Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer
- CRITICISM
- CREATIVE WRITING
- Poetry
- Short Story
- REPORTS
- Reviews
- C. K. Stead: Janet Frame, In the Memorial Room
- Juliane Römhild: Isobel Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Jennifer Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden
- Marina MacKay: Ann-Marie Einhaus, The Short Story and the First World War
- Anna Snaith: Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World
- Rishona Zimring: Kate McLoughlin, The Modernist Party
- Naomi Milthorpe: Andrew Eastham, Aesthetic Afterlives
- Notes on Contributors
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
C. K. Stead: Janet Frame, In the Memorial Room
from Reviews
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer
- CRITICISM
- CREATIVE WRITING
- Poetry
- Short Story
- REPORTS
- Reviews
- C. K. Stead: Janet Frame, In the Memorial Room
- Juliane Römhild: Isobel Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Jennifer Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden
- Marina MacKay: Ann-Marie Einhaus, The Short Story and the First World War
- Anna Snaith: Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World
- Rishona Zimring: Kate McLoughlin, The Modernist Party
- Naomi Milthorpe: Andrew Eastham, Aesthetic Afterlives
- Notes on Contributors
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
The latest publication in what has become a virtual campaign by Janet Frame's literary executors to keep her name alive and her reputation bright before the public is a novel, In the Memorial Room, written in 1974 while Frame was holding what was then called the Winn-Manson Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton. Here is what an unsigned foreword tells us about the work:
In 1973, Janet Frame was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, and she spent the following year in Menton on the Côte d'Azur. Beneath the Villa Isola Bella, where Mansfield lived and wrote for a time, is the Memorial Room, a small stone room commemorating her work and given to the Mansfield Fellow as a place to write.
Though she struggled to work in the difficult conditions of the Memorial Room – with no running water or toilet facilities and delays in receiving her fellowship payments – it was in Menton that Janet Frame wrote In the Memorial Room, the story of Harry Gill, writer and recipient of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship.
Frame did not allow publication of the manuscript during her lifetime – would certain people see themselves in the characters portrayed and, finding unflattering portraits, be offended? But she always intended the novel to be published posthumously, at the right time. Tucked away, to be looked at later, the Menton novel waited while Frame went on to write Living in the Maniatoto, a novel interlaced with some of the same characters, events and places.
Now, almost forty years after Janet Frame wrote In the Memorial Room, on her second-hand typewriter, the wait is over.
The Fellowship, we are made to feel, was less a favour to Frame than just another set of difficulties to overcome, obstacles to be surmounted – slow remittances, no running water or toilet, second-hand typewriter. But now, for us, her readers, ‘the wait is over’.
I was the holder of the Fellowship in 1972, two years before Frame, and I remember how disconcerted I was when the poet Anton Vogt, who had left New Zealand in a huff over I've forgotten what, vowing never to return, and who had taken up residence in Menton, wrote a scathing piece on Frame's behalf in the New Zealand Listener, condemning whoever was responsible for providing for her so inadequately during her tenure.
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- Katherine Mansfield and World War One , pp. 171 - 178Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014