‘[A]ctively Making One Feel’: Katherine Mansfield, Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings of the 1920s and 1930s

This chapter offers a reassessment of the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by exploring how Mansfield’s imitation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘underworld’ influenced Woolf’s perspective on Russian literature and on her friend and rival. The chapter charts Woolf’s growing empathy for Mansfield in the years after her death, arguing that this empathy constitutes a form of influence itself, as imitations of Mansfield’s experience are located in Woolf’s diary, criticism, growing feminist sensibility and fiction.

‘Where is she?’ Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen

This chapter examines the absent presence of Katherine Mansfield in Elizabeth Bowen’s personal and fictional writing to demonstrate how loss, desire and mourning might constitute a particularly female mode of literary influence. It explores Bowen’s ambivalent perceptions of Mansfield as a literary influence throughout her career, on the one hand protesting against her influence and defending her own originality, and on the other recognising her innovation and mourning her as a ‘lost contemporary’. Gildersleeve argues that the literary relationship between Bowen and Mansfield eludes both the Bloomian model of destroying the predecessor and the model of matrilineal heritage preferred by feminist literary critics. Instead, influence between Mansfield and Bowen registers as a ‘desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist’.

Writing from the Cellar: Revisiting the Villa Isola Bella

This chapter interrogates the memorialisation of Katherine Mansfield and the complex effects of the Memorial Room at Menton for Mansfield’s legacy and for the New Zealand Writing Fellows who have inhabited it since its establishment in 1969. It argues that New Zealanders ‘have found it difficult to understand her writing and have felt unsure about how to celebrate her memory’ because of her expatriate status. Mansfield’s legacy, then, is ‘often understood to be a burden by subsequent writers’. Taking up the idea of the ‘absent-present’ in literary tourism, Magner argues that the Memorial Room forces Fellows to confront Mansfield’s legacy; yet while they frequently claim that they are affected by their residency, ‘their work does not generally reveal traces of Mansfield, showing that literary influence usually fails to occur where it might be anticipated’.

Mansfield, Shakespeare and the Unanxiety of Influence

This chapter explores how William Shakespeare’s literary legacy influences Katherine Mansfield’s personal relationships and professional writing practices, and ultimately frames her own legacy. Examining Mansfield’s notebooks and correspondence, Houlahan reveals that Mansfield and John Middleton Murry enjoyed a generous, three-way literary engagement with Shakespeare, described as the ‘unanxiety of influence’ for the ‘bold, unafraid and explicit’ manner in which Mansfield used Shakespeare without any desire to emulate him. The chapter particularly focuses on Mansfield’s enchantment with these lines from Henry IV, Part 1: ‘But I tell you my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety', which she recorded in a 1916 notebook, used in the late story, ‘This Flower’, and which Murry, ultimately, placed on her tombstone, enigmatically framing Mansfield’s own legacy.

Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence

This chapter traces the lodestar role that Katherine Mansfield played for the Australian literary critic Nettie Palmer. Palmer’s literary archive reveals her enchantment with Mansfield as a reader, writer and literary journalist, highlighting the impact of Mansfield’s posthumously published personal writing on her. Mansfield’s presence in Palmer’s archive exposes a thread of literary influence between literary critics and, through Palmer, to an even wider network of literary correspondents. In Palmer’s reviews, letters and notebooks Mansfield alters, chameleon-like, to fit her purpose: the successful colonial writer in exile, the mourned absent contemporary and the incisive literary critic who prompts Palmer to reflect on her own professional writing.

‘The Twilight of Language’: The Young Evelyn Waugh on ‘Catherine’ Mansfield

This chapter offers the first account of Katherine Mansfield's literary connections to Evelyn Waugh. It exposes the satiric potential of literary influence through a consideration of Waugh's schoolboy paper ‘The Twilight of Language’ (1921). Milthorpe describes satire as ‘a mode of writing by necessity alive to outside in influence’ and notes the significant intertextual parallels of narrative, theme and technique between Mansfield's ‘Bliss’ (1918) and Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934), making the case that Waugh’s response to modernism should be interpreted not as rejection, but instead as ‘a destructive misreading that generates a parodic likeness’.

Mansfield eats Dickens

This chapter explores Katherine Mansfield's remark that ‘we all, as writers, to a certain extent, absorb each other when we love . . . Anatole France would say we eat each other’ to explore her devotion to Charles Dickens throughout her life and her absorption of ‘essential aspects of his humour’. It reveals that Mansfield’s enchantment with Dickens produced two effects of influence: first, ‘the presence of numerous Dickensian stylistic devices in her writing’, particularly their ‘many shared satiric emphases, especially their critiques of the societies in which they lived’, and second the revival of Dickens’ reputation in the interwar period. Hollington argues that in her capacity as a reviewer and through her connections to modernist magazines Mansfield ‘did as much as she could to reaffirm Dickens as a consummate artist both of tragedy and comedy’.

‘Like a thousand reflections of my own hands in a dark mirror’: Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

This chapter extends the theorisation of literary influence beyond arguments put forward by Harold Bloom (around anxiety) and Bonnie Kime Scott (around modernist coteries) by asserting that it is blind to temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. It argues that revisiting influence as a driver of literary creativity is critical as literary theory seeks once again to situate texts and think about the author. Katherine Mansfield is an apposite study for influence in a variety of registers - including ambivalence, exchange, identification, imitation, enchantment and legacy - because of her rich engagement with her literary predecessors and contemporaries, and the degree to which she impacted inheritors across time and place.

‘Objectless Love’: The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield

This chapter maps parallels in the personal lives and literary concerns of Katherine Mansfield and Colette. Mansfield identified Colette as a kindred spirit who had very close thematic and stylistic concerns. In Colette’s novels, particularly The Vagabond, Mansfield found ‘a legitimate and desirable mode of life for a modern woman artist’ that she adopted in her writing and throughout her life. The chapter argues that Mansfield’s identification in Colette of her own struggle between romantic coupledom and the solitude and self-realisation needed to create art provided a way of understanding her own experience.

‘Worms of the Same Family’: Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim

This chapter traces literary influence Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim, writers who were artistic contemporaries, cousins and friends. It explores the relationship between kinship and literary influence: Elizabeth von Arnim was an early influence on Mansfield, prompted by their close family ties, and von Arnim’s Elizabeth novels clearly influenced Mansfield's In a German Pension (1911). Yet family identification can also threaten personal relationships, particularly when one writer enjoys more success than the other due to the adoption of different artistic ideologies and practices. Familial rivalry can itself, however, work as inspiration, revealed in the correspondence between Mansfield and von Arnim.