The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield

edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott

Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1984-

  • v. 1: 1903-1917
  • v. 2: 1918-1919
  • v. 3: 1919-1920
  • v. 4: 1920-1921
  • v. 5: 1922-1923

Available at  / 86 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references and indexes

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

v. 1: 1903-1917 ISBN 9780198126133

Description

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield Volume I: 1903-1917
Volume

v. 2: 1918-1919 ISBN 9780198126140

Description

This volume, the second of four, includes her correspondence from early 1918 to the autumn of 1919. Her love for Middleton Murry, her response to the First World War, and her acceptance of the inevitable advance of tuberculosis, are handled with wit and warmth, in a text which has been transcribed afresh from the original letters.
Volume

v. 3: 1919-1920 ISBN 9780198126157

Description

The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial. This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might turn her illness to less negative ends. As she put it, 'One must be ... continually giving & receiving, and shedding & renewing, & examining & trying to place'. For all the grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time.

Table of Contents

  • Textual note. The letters: Italy - Ospedaletti, September-December 1919
  • Italy - Ospedaletti, December 1919-January 1920
  • France - Menton, January-April 1920.
Volume

v. 5: 1922-1923 ISBN 9780198183990

Description

The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different - if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived? Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She went against what her education, her husband, and most of her friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last months with Russian emigres and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff disciples (which she was not). But Fontainebleau give her the space and the incentive to shake free from the intellectualism that she thought the malaise of her time, as she worked at kitchen chores, took in the details of farm life, tried to learn Russian, and attempted to reach total honesty with herself. 'If I were allowed one simple cry to God,' she wrote in one of her last letters, that cry would be I want to be REAL.'

Table of Contents

THE LETTERS

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

Page Top