The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives

Chapter 4 examines the posthumous publication of Mansfield’s writings in John Middleton Murry’s magazine The Adelphi. The chapter interrogates the ways in which Mansfield’s reputation was moulded and mediated in the magazine, with Murry eliding those disruptive and disjunctive aspects of Mansfield’s work examined in the first three chapters of the book: of Mansfield the feminist, who eschewed gender stereotypes of feminine ‘purity’ and ‘saintliness’ in The New Age; of Mansfield the (post)colonial writer, who negotiated a deliberately ambiguous position for her work between England and New Zealand in Rhythm; and of Mansfield the modernist, whose critical writings in The Athenaeum indubitably helped to shape the literary innovations of the early 1920s. In this way, the chapter shows how the so-called ‘Mansfield myth’ owed much to the periodical contexts in which it was first formulated.

The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)

Between April 1919 and December 1920, Mansfield found her voice as a literary critic, publishing over a hundred reviews under the initials ‘K.M.’ in the literary journal The Athenaeum, edited by John Middleton Murry. In her reviews, Mansfield linked the ‘new word’ of modernist formal experimentation with the spatial imaginary of an ‘undiscovered country’ or ‘new world’, a critical vocabulary formulated in response to the disintegration and ‘spiritual crisis’ of the First World War. The chapter positions Mansfield’s work in relation to writings by D. H. Lawrence and Murry, before tracing a dialogue between her reviews and Virginia Woolf’s critical writings in the years 1919–20. The chapter highlights the ways in which both Mansfield and Woolf privileged deep ‘emotion’ as the basis for a modernist ‘new word’.

The New Age: Gender, Nation and Empire

Chapter 1 examines the ways in which Mansfield unsettled established ideas about nationhood and empire by responding to the politics of individualist feminism in the pages of The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage. In particular, this chapter traces textual convergences between Mansfield’s writings and work published in The New Age by its shadow co-editor, Beatrice Hastings. Like Mansfield, Hastings was an ‘outsider’ in London; born in South Africa, her writings demonstrate a sustained engagement with the politics of empire and offer a radical critique of the metropolitan consensus about gender and female suffrage. Through an analysis of original archival findings, including a short story and aphorisms, it is argued that Mansfield’s writings helped to augment Hastings’s critique of liberal feminism, thereby unsettling and challenging established ideas about marriage and motherhood, nationhood and the empire.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter reiterates the central claim of this book, that reading Mansfield’s writings within the original historical contexts of periodical publication enables us to situate her work more resolutely as embedded within particular political, aesthetic and social debates, and as produced through networks of association with other writers and artists. It is argued that this focus helps to challenge the misconception of Mansfield as a writer of limited generic interest, revealing the incredible diversity of genres that she employed throughout her writing career. Importantly, returning to the periodicals and magazines in which Mansfield published also enables us to reposition her more decisively as a colonial-metropolitan modernist, writing both within and against the London literary establishment.

Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism

Chapter 2 examines Mansfield’s contributions to the self-consciously ‘modernist’ little magazine Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry. Through an analysis of Mansfield’s ‘parodic translations’ and short story contributions to the magazine, the chapter examines the ways in which Mansfield used Rhythm as a performative space in which to develop multiple authorial identities and cultivate different national registers in her work, employing parody, satire and mimicry as modes of critique. Whilst Mansfield identified with the metropolitan modernism advanced by the magazine, it is argued, she also sought to introduce aspects of cultural difference into Rhythm that challenged the spatial imaginaries upon which its discourse of communal affiliation had been constituted. As such, the chapter examines the ways in which Mansfield’s contributions to Rhythm figure an ambivalent negotiation of the colonial/metropolitan binary, helping us to reposition her as a proto-postcolonial writer or ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’.

Introduction: ‘The famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’

The introduction to this book outlines the scholarly contexts that inform it, including the explosion of interest over recent years in early twentieth-century print cultures, the ‘transnational turn’ that has taken place across the discipline of literary studies, and shifts particular to scholarship on Katherine Mansfield. The chapter then considers Mansfield’s engagements with periodical culture before 1910 in order to highlight how, from the very beginning of her career, Mansfield used the magazine form as a space of subversion in which to translate her writing across cultures, articulate fantasies of global movement, and unsettle established ideas about modernity, nation and empire.