A true original

An enthusiastic delve into 10 of Katherine Mansfield’s stories and her life when writing them underlines a tragic loss to literature. by CKSTEAD

- CK STEAD

ALL SORTS OF LIVES: Katherine Mansfi eld and the art of risking everything, by Claire Harman (Chatto & Windus, $37)

This is a vividly written, enthusiastic account of Katherine Mansfield’s life and work, taking, chronologically, 10 of her short stories and her life around the time each was written.

It analyses well what it was that made her fiction “modernist”, how fresh and, above all, original it was in its time, and how much a writer like Virginia Woolf owed to it. In addition to Woolf, it puts Mansfi eld into the company, and the literary context, of her other major contemporaries: TS Eliot, James Joyce, DH Lawrence and Bertrand Russell. What it makes clear, not for the first time but in painful detail, is what a loss to literature in English her death in 1923 was, and how close she came to writing fiction that would have confirmed the enormous talent revealed in her letters and journals.

Mansfield was never entirely satisfied with even the best of her stories. She felt she was always on the brink of something better – and I think she was. Harman, on the other hand, is one of those “Mansfi eld can do no wrong” critics, whose enthusiasms are slightly suspect because they are so seldom qualified by doubts or reservations.

She is, for example, uncomprehending of Woolf reading the story “Bliss” and throwing it down saying, “She’s done for.” Harman is accurate in her analysis of how that story works, how it moves in and out of Bertha’s consciousness while keeping a safe distance and avoiding total emotional identification.