Wow. With The God Species, this is the best book I have read so far this year. I have never really met Katherine Mansfield – a brief flirtation with 'At the Bay' while we were in Wellington staying in a house a stone’s throw away from her solid upper middle class family holiday home in Days Bay – but nothing more. Short stories have never really grabbed me – probably because of the dreadful experiences we were subjected to at school with a totally uninspiring teacher. (Luckily Mansfield wasn’t amongst them!)
The cover of the book caught my eye in Kalk Bay Books – a joyous portrait of a young Katherine by the Irish American artist, Anne Estelle Rice – a contemporary of Katherine’s. And the book certainly lives up to the cover – I was enthralled from start to finish. It is a beautifully crafted biography – each chapter more engrossing than the next; introduced by a quote from either Katherine or a contmeporaroy wiriting about her. Well chosen illustrations and a good index just add to this wonderful biography of a complex, talented and rather unusual woman who was writing at a rather interesting time in England's literary history. She was a friend of DH Lawrence, predictably shrugged off as not really important by TS Eliot, James Joyce and other puffed up male contemporaries, much admired by Virginia Woolf (although she never really 'belonged' to the vicious, capricious Bloomsbury set) and died at 34 of TB in a strange alternative health establishment outside Paris.
So, I am now going to enrich Amazon dot com with some downloads of Katherine Mansfield to my Kindle (there being a total dearth of her books in every bookshop – first and second hand) – and ALL of Claire Tomalin’s other biographies that include Jane Austen, Nelly Ternan and Dickens, Mary Wollenstonecraft and Dora Jordan – the actress and mistress of William IV). And I think I might even take to reading short stories too.
So, I am now going to enrich Amazon dot com with some downloads of Katherine Mansfield to my Kindle (there being a total dearth of her books in every bookshop – first and second hand) – and ALL of Claire Tomalin’s other biographies that include Jane Austen, Nelly Ternan and Dickens, Mary Wollenstonecraft and Dora Jordan – the actress and mistress of William IV). And I think I might even take to reading short stories too.
