Abstract
In November 1920, with a little over two years left to live, Mansfield wrote to Murry:
What a QUEER business writing is. I don’t know. I don’t believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while I’m working. How could they be? Writers would have to live in trees. […] If one remained oneself all the time like some writers can it would be a bit less exhausting.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), vol. 4, p. 97. Hereafter referred to as Letters followed by volume and page number.
Antony Alpers comments: ‘Back in Wellington, after her years at Queen’s College, [Mansfield] expressed her misery in some self-indulgent mood pieces, strongly influenced by her passion for Oscar Wilde. Entitled Vignettes, some of these were eagerly accepted in Melbourne by E. J. Brady for his newly founded magazine, the Native Companion’. Antony Alpers, ed., The Stories of Katherine Mansfield: Definitive Edition (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 545.
W. H. New, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). p. ix.
Gillian Boddy, ‘Frau Brechenmacher and Stanley Burnell: Some Background Discussion on the Treatment of the Roles of Men and Women in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield’, in Michel Dupuis and Paulette Michel, eds, The Fine Instrument (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989), p. 91.
Julia van Gunsteren, too, discusses this feature: The Platonic distinction between diegesis and mimesis has persisted throughout discussions on the way of rendering speech and has served as a point of departure for discussions of ‘point of view’ in fiction ever since James and Lubbock. The characteristic feature of diegesis is that ‘the poet himself is the speaker’ and does not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking. In mimesis, on the other hand, the poet tries to create the illusion that it is not he who is speaking. Julia van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), p. 101. The narrator’s absence from the texts of Mansfield remains one of the most striking features of her work. As Gunsteren also points out: ‘[t]he narrator’s presence in or absence from a text has a crucial effect on a story’s structure. The narrator is therefore the most central concept in the analysis of a narrative text. The identity of the narrator, his participation, his perceptibility, and the choices that are implied, all give the text its specific character’ (p. 100).
Ida Baker, The Memories of LM (London: Michael Joseph, 1971), p. 233.
Leonard Woolf, The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 204.
Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987), p. 6.
Delia da Sousa Correa, ‘Performativity in Words: Musical Performance in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 3, 2011, eds Delia da Sousa Correa, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid, pp. 21–34.
Copyright information
© 2015 Gerri Kimber
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kimber, G. (2015). Mansfield’s Narrative Technique. In: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483881_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137483881_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50327-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48388-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)