Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer
- CRITICISM
- ‘By what name are we to call death?’: The Case of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’
- Katherine Mansfield's War
- Mansfield's ‘Writing Game’ and World War One
- Ordinary Discordance: Katherine Mansfield and the First World War
- Katherine Mansfield's Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of ‘The Aloe’
- War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield's Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World
- Mythology and/of the Great War in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- Poetry
- Short Story
- REPORTS
- Reviews
- Notes on Contributors
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Katherine Mansfield's War
from CRITICISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer
- CRITICISM
- ‘By what name are we to call death?’: The Case of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’
- Katherine Mansfield's War
- Mansfield's ‘Writing Game’ and World War One
- Ordinary Discordance: Katherine Mansfield and the First World War
- Katherine Mansfield's Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of ‘The Aloe’
- War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield's Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World
- Mythology and/of the Great War in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- Poetry
- Short Story
- REPORTS
- Reviews
- Notes on Contributors
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
The War will leave none of us as it found us.
May SinclairThere is a case to be made that, despite the unfortunate interlude involving the death of her brother in 1915, Katherine Mansfield did her best to ignore the 1914–18 war, the ‘Great War’. Jeffrey Meyers makes the case forcefully:
she too was oblivious to the cataclysm until it affected her personal life – and even afterwards. Though the battle of Verdun was raging while Katherine and Murry lived blissfully in Bandol, they felt the War was merely a personal inconvenience and never mentioned it.
At first glance, a brief summary of the facts would seem to support Meyers's contention. Not only did Mansfield have the temerity to dissemble and bluff her way into the war zone in France for a tryst with her lover-in-waiting, Francis Carco, in early February 1915, but also she returned to Paris twice within three months – in March, when she seemed entranced by the sight of a Zeppelin, and again in May. Then, in mid-November and little more than a month after the death of her brother, Leslie, she hurried off to the South of France (Marseilles, Cassis, then Bandol), where she settled until the end of March 1916. Her final, and longest, visit to France during the war began on 8 January 1918 and lasted well over three months until 11 April 1918.
In his autobiography, Between Two Worlds (1935), John Middleton Murry seems to confirm at least their indifference to the war. After describing a solemn farewell visit from Elliott Crooke, an Oxford friend in the Special Reserve, who arrived with his kit and sword, he writes:
We were neither for war, nor against it. To be for or against a thing, it must belong to one's world; and this was not in ours […] We stood, clasping hands, by the railings of Green Park, late at night, while a Highland Regiment – someone said the Black Watch – marched to the station.
Though Murry feels empowered to speak both for himself and for Mansfield, the evidence of her letters, notebooks and stories belies both his confident claim about their attitude to the war and the indictment by Meyers. As she once wrote to S. S. Koteliansky, ‘Dont believe the conjugal “we”.’
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- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and World War One , pp. 27 - 41Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014