Katherine Mansfield, like Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf, belongs to the long nineteenth century. We are not as accustomed to thinking of her in this way, for Mansfield took with her to England from her New Zealand homeland on the far side of the globe a style that was ‘already modern’ in its linguistic informality and experimental use of stream of consciousness techniques. She is one of many examples of how literary Modernism was shaped by the pioneering work of writers from beyond Europe. Nevertheless, while Mansfield was less constrained by tradition and convention than some of her contemporaries when forging her way as a writer, it is also clear that nineteenth-century literature and music provided an abundant wellspring of material which became transfigured in her modernist idiom. In this essay I propose that her allusions to music are particularly informed by her nineteenth-century reading and listening, and that this played a formative role in her development as a Modernist writer.

Mansfield's stories invite musical analogy, and she wrote with music very consciously in mind. For her 1920 story ‘Miss Brill’, she recorded that ‘I chose not only the length of every sentence, but even the sound of every sentence […]. I read it aloud […] just as one would play over a musical composition’. Mansfield rarely commented so directly on her writing and this statement provides an invaluable insight into her artistic methods and her own view of the connections between literary and musical composition.