Katherine Mansfield and the Fictions of Continental Europe

Abstract

My first thought in approaching the subject of ‘Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe’ was that most Mansfield scholars and critics take almost as a given that her New Zealand stories are her ‘best’ — but are they? The question should at least be reconsidered from time to time, because there has always been an element of literary nationalism in it, and national sentiment is, or should be, largely irrelevant to literary criticism. I had in mind that there are a few stories quite late in her short career which leave not only family and Wellington behind, but London too, and seem embedded in continental Europe; and that these perhaps promised a new path, a different flavour, a new sophistication — stories like ‘Poison’ (1920), and ‘The Escape’ (1920). There is also, a little earlier, ‘Je ne parle pas français’ (1918) — technically very important in her development. And there’s even the question of whether all of the In a German Pension stories deserve their relegation to the second-class status she gave them. These are some of the thoughts and questions I began with, for what I intended should be an essentially old-fashioned literary-critical exercise.