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Secret Life

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summary: Claire Tomalin’s bio Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life Different from Alpers and Meyers – More about sexuality and illness – Less about . . .
Claire Tomalin’s bio Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life

Different from Alpers and Meyers

• More about sexuality and illness
• Less about literature
• Against the John Middleton Murry Katherine that we get from Alpers
  • That she’s perfect doll, complete genius
• More about D. H. Lawrence and Sobieniowski
  • D. H. and she were mutually very complementary
  • Less about DH having “affair,” more about artistic stuff
  • Floryan S. blackmailed her about the Chekhov plagiarism of “Sleepy”
• More access to letters
• Female sympathy (author’s female too)

Personal Anecdotes

• Wore glasses when she was little even though her sight was fine
• Wrote own school mag when schoolmistress said her writing was undisciplined and selfish
• Wore Maori costume in various London drawing rooms
• Had an 8-yr-old child sent to her in Germany after her miscarriage
• Kept a revolver next to her Chaucer and Shx on bedside table

Themes

• Colonial transplant
• Distrust of family
• Impermanent housing
• Chronic illness

Work

• Grotesque
• Colorful
• Post-impressionist
• Impersonal
• Professional
• Studious
• Speed
• Clarity
• Economy
• Delicacy
• Charm
• Ephemeral
• Concise

Self

• Solitary
• Observant
• Alert
• Cynical
• Gay
• Lonely
• Contrarian
• Mocking
• Penetrating
• Masklike
• False
• Manipulative
• Needy
• Jealous
• Dramatic
• Small
• Entertaining
• Witty
• Show-off
• Liar
• Adventurous
• Courageous

Life dates

• Oct 14, 1888: born, Wellington, NZ
• 1893: move to rural Karori (subject of Prelude)
• 1899: back to Wellington
• 1903-6: studies in Queen’s College in London with two older sisters
• 1906-8: back to Wellington (bored to death, still tries to become pro cellist)
• mid-1908: back to London
• 1909: pregnant by Garnett Trowell (former NZ violinist), engaged with him until his parents find out; marries Cambridge music scholar George Bowden and runs away from him the next day; takes off for Brussels with her mother to hide her pregnancy; meets Floryan and contracts gonorrhea
• 1912: JMM moves into her flat
• 1913-6: very close to Lawrences; brother and brother-in-law die in war
• 1916: catches tuberculosis from D. H., meets Woolf
• Jan 9, 1923: dies at the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man

Career

• First published “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” 1910
• Then published stories in The New Age
• First collection, In a German Pension, 1911
• Started two novels (The Aloe, which became “Prelude,” Maata, a biographical novel about her and Ida (herself as a budding opera star, with Ida the devoted friend), but had no stamina
• Most well-received collection, Bliss and Other Stories 1920
• 1922: The Garden Party (last book published in her lifetime)

Quotes

• “She lived, worked, and died with the Furies on her heels.” (7)
• Her mother, after a year-long absence: “Well, Kathleen, I see you are as fat as ever.” (13)
• How Katherine imagines her father: “Show the world that you are expensive.” (30)
• On feminism: “All this suffragist movement is excellent for our sex—kicked policemen or not kicked policemen.” (43)
• After a lifeless meeting of suffragists: “I ran into the street…& decided I could not be a suffragette—the world was too full of laughter.” (59)
• “In fact I have no being, but am making preparations for changing everything.” (149, in a letter to Koteliansky)
• Woolf on John M Murry: “There was Murry squirming and oozing some kind of thick motor oil in the background.” (204)
• On her aims for writing, in terms of what she wants to audience to do: “first see life differently and then make it different.” (235)
• Lawrence on KM’s death: “What is going to happen to us all?”