Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

September 1921

page 137

To Violet Schiff

I am sure Switzerland is the place for health and for work—I mean especially and above all for nerves. There is an extraordinary feeling of ease here. It seems it is easy to live; one feels remote and undisturbed. I've never known anything like the feeling of peace and when one isn't working the freshness in the air, the smell of pines, the taste of snow in one's teeth—that's exaggeration—it's only the spiritual flavour. I think I really judge a place by how vividly I can recall the past. One lives in the Past—or I do. And here it is living.

My book is to lie in Constable's bosom until after the New Year. It's called, after all, The Garden-Party. I hope you like the title. The Mercury is publishing one of the stories in a month or two. Terribly long. Too long for the Mercury. But that's enough and too much about me—

And now I have forgotten my health. Thank you, dearest Violet. I think my lungs are quiescent—rather the disease is. My heart is the same at present. But I feel much better—a different person altogether on the whole. No longer an invalid, even tho' I still can't walk and still cough and so on…