Mansfield

With encouraging enthusiasm the members of the Literary Society gathered on Monday evening to hear Professor Cordon's address on Katherine Mansfield.

The atmosphere was one of general well-being and hopeful optimism as Professor Gordon prefaced his subject with a brief account of the failure of the similar Phoenix Club in 1939 and 1940, and congratulated the Society on its spontaneous outburst this year.

As we were introduced to the authoress as a short story writer, poet, and novelist and New Zealander, our interest changed to something more familiar and intimate. We were very much aware of her as a Wellingtonian; as one who had looked on the familiar hills and harbour as her home, and who had reached across the years as readily as her mind leapt the distance she travelled, to recapture the sights and sounds of our own land.

Professor Gordon presented us with two aspects of the subject. Katherine Mansfield's place in the development of the short story, and her position in relation to New Zealand writing. The unreliability of all sources of biographical material was emphasised, and, aware of the impersonal outline of her life, her childhood and adolescence spent in Wellington, her departure to England and numerous European journeys from there, we experienced with Professor Gordon disappointment that her husband, John Middleton Murry, should have so successfully barred the way to a more personal and complete understanding of her journals and letters. It was with his help that most of her early material was published in England, but it is regrettable that he controlled and abridged the greater and more important autobiographical writings he published after her death.

Katherine Mansfield as a short story writer has been considered unique. Her development of the technique, though attributed by some to a close observation of the writings of Tchekov, established itself as a new and original form of writing—rather an interpretation of character or mood than a development of the patterned form of the 19th century. Critical opinion accepts that she did something vital and original for the short story.

Although she did most of her writing in England, it is with gratification we realise that she turned continually to the scenes of her childhood and youth for the sources of her inspiration and material; and it was with pride we claim her as a New Zealand writer.