Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Colophon
- Introduction
- Criticism
- Creative Writing
- Reports
- Reviews
- Vincent O'Sullivan: Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice
- Marco Sonzogni: Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 (Volume 1) and The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1916-1922 (Volume 2)
- Isobel Maddison: Martin Hipsky, Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925
- Brigid Magner: Alex Calder, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand, and Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross, The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction
- Alexandra Smith: Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
- Notes on Contributors
- Katherine Mansfield Society
Vincent O'Sullivan: Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice
from Reviews
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Colophon
- Introduction
- Criticism
- Creative Writing
- Reports
- Reviews
- Vincent O'Sullivan: Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice
- Marco Sonzogni: Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 (Volume 1) and The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1916-1922 (Volume 2)
- Isobel Maddison: Martin Hipsky, Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925
- Brigid Magner: Alex Calder, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand, and Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross, The Lonely and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction
- Alexandra Smith: Galya Diment, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky
- Notes on Contributors
- Katherine Mansfield Society
Summary
Of the more than 120 books Mansfield reviewed for the Athenaeum between April 1919 and the end of 1920, there were fewer than a dozen collections of short stories. Most of what Murry chose to assign to her were inferior novels. Occasionally her reviews were too easily dismissive, as with a reprint of George Moore’s Esther Waters, or when she failed to engage with E. M. Forster or Gertrude Stein as seriously as she might have done. Almost always though her writing is alert, focused, stylish, witty, and at times impressively generous. Yet there is little we can take from her Athenaeum columns that tell us much about what she demanded or hoped for in the short story. Only infrequently does a sentence bear on her own writing, or on the form she is famous for, as in her praise for writing that echoes Chekhov’s melding of symbolism and naturalism to intensify our awareness ‘of the rain pattering on the roof all night long, of the languid, feverish wind, of the moonlit orchard and the fi rst snow, passionately realized, not indeed as analogies for a state of mind, but as linking that mind to the larger whole.’1 Or when, writing admiringly of the Belgian Louis Couperus, she draws a distinction between those who merely depict life, and those who ‘by accepting life [. . .] question it profoundly’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial , pp. 193 - 205Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013