Abstract
‘Not being an intellectual’, Katherine Mansfield wrote to John Middleton Murry in 1920, ‘I always seem to have to learn things at the risk of my life.’ The remark suggests some of the dangers inherent in the enterprise of attempting to establish KM’s reputation as a critic. She is alluding here, with some hostility, to Murry’s book of critical essays The Evolution of an Intellectual (1920), and distancing herself from the kind of professional criticism produced by Murry, which did not often represent something learnt ‘at the risk of [one’s] life’. In an earlier letter she expressed her distaste for Murry’s intellectual approach: a note of conviction is sustained rather than undermined by her admission of feelings of vulnerability in writing as a (relatively) uneducated woman and as a colonial — the ‘little Colonial’ from Karori.
But this intellectual reasoning is never the whole truth. It’s not the artist’s truth — not creative. If man were an intellect it would do, but man ISN’T. Now I must be fair, I must be fair. Who am I to be certain that I understand? There’s always Karori to shout after me. Shout it.1
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Notes
Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography (1968) II, 538.
Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–18 (1964) p. 204.
Anthony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1980) p. 353.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1978) p. 246.
See, in this respect, Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, and C. A. Hankin, The Confessional Stories of Katherine Mansfield (1983).
See, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979) in their article ‘Sexual Linguistics: Gender, Language, Sexuality’, New Literary History, 16.3 (Spring 1985) 515–43.
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© 1987 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Hanson, C. (1987). Introduction. In: Hanson, C. (eds) The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18619-8_1
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