Introduction

Abstract

Discussion of Mansfield’s writing technique in the early years after her death was initially subordinate to the overwhelming interest in her personality, with the hagiography of her life and praise for her personal writing — particularly in France — for many years taking precedence over any consideration of her fiction. However, with the passage of time there emerged a more balanced and critical viewpoint, removing the saint-like, ethereal, wholly false mask of the author so revered by the French. My aim in this book is to illustrate how radical and innovative Mansfield’s narrative writing would become during her lifetime, ultimately placing her at the forefront of modernist short story writers. Recent criticism has also turned towards favouring Mansfield’s personal brand of literary modernism. As an example, in Michael Levenson’s 1999 Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Mansfield is only accorded a few brief mentions; however, in his revised 2011 edition of the same book, space devoted to criticism of Mansfield is considerably enhanced, particularly in Elleke Boehmer and Steven Matthews’s chapter on ‘Modernism and Colonialism’, where several pages are devoted to Mansfield criticism.²

It seems to me very important that women should learn to write. Does it to you? God knows I don’t like them much when they do it — or men either for the matter of that. Mr Beresford gave a lecture upon fiction the other day at the 1917 Club — a deplorable exhibition … and then Morgan Forster said the Prelude and The Voyage Out were the best novels of their time, and I said damn Katherine! Why can’t I be the only woman who knows how to write?

Virginia Woolf writing to Katherine Mansfield, 13 February 1921.¹