2007-12-09 From writer of "twaddle" to aspirational model

Katherine Mansfield, born in Wellington, NZ in 1888, was strangely unfitted for her time, with an independent spirit that led her to deny many accepted conventions. Writing was her whole life's focus.
Published from the age of nine, she commented:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Her short stories, collected here, reflect wonderfully her keen eye for the pretension and absurdity in much of human behaviour - and the strict limitations set on a woman of her class and era. Men departed every morning to carry out mysterious functions at the office while women stayed at home, organising the servants and being decorative.
She dissects family life, marriage and loneliness - both inside and outside relationships. What strikes me most is her piercing humour; but also her equally piercing, sometimes almost unbearable insight into women's exasperating, inescapable compulsion towards a man rather than to independence. Katherine Mansfield strove to free herself from human entanglements and betrayals which were a distraction from her writing; and as her biographer Claire Tomalin shows, caused her life-long health as well as emotional problems.
Her stories often catch the reader between helpless laughter and a sinister lurking horror in the background:

"When I was with Lady Tukes," said Nurse Andrews, "she had such a dainty little contrayvance for the buttah. It was a silvah Cupid balanced on the - on the bordah of a glass dish, holding a tayny fork".

"she wore a black velvet toque, with an incredibly surprised looking seagull camped on the very top of it".

"They like me at first; they think me uncommon, or original; but then immediately I want to show them - even give them a hint - that I like them, they seem to get frightened and begin to disappear".

"If I had seen him in the street I would have said I could not possibly love a man who wore a cap like that....the way it makes his ears stick out, and way it makes him have no back to his head at all".