Reality versus Dream

Abstract

In the same issue of Rhythm as ‘New Dresses’ and ‘The Little Girl’, Katherine Mansfield published a satirical piece called ‘Sunday Lunch’. Here she unleashed against the London ‘arty’ set the bitterness which, in more restrained form, echoes through her stories of childhood. The very sharpness of her attack in ‘Sunday Lunch’ indicates that it was motivated by more than a desire to exhibit her cleverness: behind it one detects the jealousy which is revealed again and again in the stories based on her own childhood. Katherine’s problem as a writer was that, although her talents were being noticed, she did not feel at home in London literary circles. These were dominated by the socially exclusive Bloomsbury group; and, although she herself had grown up in a privileged, upper-class family, she was personally unknown in London, and, what was worse, a colonial. For one as ambitious as Katherine and as much in need of acceptance, such exclusion was galling.