Abstract
‘Two women — and both Beauchamps!’ This was how John Middleton Murry summed up the relationship between his wife Katherine Mansfield and her older cousin Elizabeth von Arnim, as he observed them together in the summer of 1921. At the time, von Arnim was a best-selling author; Mansfield’s best work was yet to be written and Murry’s remark, recorded carefully in one of Mansfield’s Notebooks,1 draws attention to an aspect of her life and work which is often neglected. She and her husband had recently arrived in the Swiss Alps and were staying at the health resort of Montana-sur-Sierre. The months they spent there were enlivened by the presence of von Arnim who was staying, as she did for several months every year, at her mountain home, the magnificent Chalet Soleil, in a small village just down the mountainside.
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Notes
Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002), Vol. 2, p. 274.
Leslie de Charms, Elizabeth of the German Garden (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 9.
Jennifer Walker, Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey (Hove: Book Guild, 2013), pp. 19–20.
Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 16.
Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and her German Garden (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 9.
Isobel Maddison, Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 101. Maddison points to the cumulative impression of familiarity when ‘reading Mansfield’s first collection of stories through the lens of von Arnim’s early work’.
Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (London: Virago Press, 1990), p. 70.
Kathleen Beauchamp, ‘Die Einsame’, Queen’s College Magazine, XXII: 75 (1904), p. 129.
Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 9–13.
Delia da Sousa Correa, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth Century Echoes’, in Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 84.
Ruth Mantz and John Middleton Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable & Co, 1933), p. 129.
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Night-Scented Stock’ in John Middleton Murry, ed., Poems by Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable & Co., 1930), p. 59. I am grateful to Dr Gerri Kimber for the following information: the handwritten manuscript is to be found in Ottoline Morrell’s papers in the University of Texas at Austin; the poem could have been inspired by a walk around the garden at Garsington.
Elizabeth von Arnim, Christopher and Columbus (London: Virago Press, 2002).
Katherine Mansfield, ‘Two Novels of Worth’ in John Middleton Murry, ed., Novels and Novelists (London: Constable, 1930), p. 7.
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’, in The Montana Stories (London: Persephone Books, 2001), p. 154.
Mansfield to the Countess Russell (Sunday 23 October 1921), Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), Vol. 4, p. 301. Hereafter referred to as Letters followed by volume and page number.
Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April (London: Virago Press, 1986).
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© 2015 Jennifer Walker
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Walker, J. (2015). The Beauchamp Connection. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_10
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