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Editing the New Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, eds

from Reports

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2014

Vincent O'Sullivan
Affiliation:
Victoria University
Janet Wilson
Affiliation:
University of Northampton
Gerri Kimber
Affiliation:
University of Northampton
Delia da Sousa Correa
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Summary

There's always that discreet warning ringing in an editor's ear: Mansfield pretty much telling Murry not to hang on too eagerly to every scrap that survives her, and that she wants to leave as little evidence of her camping ground as possible. To stretch that metaphor, the editors' job (Gerri Kimber and myself), in this edition at any rate, has been to get as big a pile of soup cans, half full bottles, and scarcely opened packets as possible. In one sense – if you're tempted to be cynical about it – the untidier Mansfield's camp site remains, the better we've done our job. Which, happily, a good reviewer understands. As a long review in the London Review of Books by Kirsty Gunn puts it:

By giving us every draft and fragment in the order of their production – including schoolgirl jottings, drafts that never made it into print, and the four recently discovered short stories that were the subject of press interest last year – the editors of the Edinburgh edition are able to show us, on the page, the craftswoman learning what she needs to learn in order to be published and become well known, and then learning from those lessons in order to forget them.

It is also an essay that brilliantly homes in on the point of how:

Her notebooks and reviews return again and again to the split between fiction as art and ‘entertainment’, the glory of the perhaps failed attempt as against the safe complacencies of technique. […]

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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