Meetings with ‘the Great Ghost’

Abstract

My awareness of Katherine Mansfield began even before I’d read her. When I was at primary school during the Second World War there was a series of cards, ‘Great New Zealanders’, which came with the breakfast cereal, Weetbix, and I still remember some of them. The great New Zealand scientist was (of course) Rutherford, the great athlete was Jack Lovelock, the All Black George Nepia, the tennis player Anthony Wilding, the statesman ‘King Dick’ Seddon, the soldier ‘Tiny’ Freyberg, the opera singer Oscar Natzke, the Maori leader Sir Peter Buck and the writer Katherine Mansfield. There were others, but if my memory is right there was just one of each category. I’m sure Mansfield would have been chosen for one reason only — not because in New Zealand she was much read outside the literary community, but because she was known to have ‘made it overseas’. These were still (though I would soon be resenting and rejecting the description) colonial times — but the Dominion (as it then was) was striving to shake itself loose, to see itself as an independent nation. What better measure (ordinary New Zealanders would have asked) that we were a nation in our own right than that some of ours could measure up against those of the homeland; could succeed and shine there?