Katherine Mansfield's Notebooks Challenge Her Angelic Image

Katherine Mansfield had a short life, passing away at the age of 34 due to tuberculosis. Despite her brief existence, she managed to develop a significant literary career and became a master of the short story. Mansfield (1888-1923) had an early fascination with literature, as evidenced by her writing her first story at the age of nine. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, her family moved to London at the beginning of the 20th century, where she studied at Queen's College. She was soon captivated by the works of Ibsen and Oscar Wilde, influences she would later outgrow.

Gifted with an astonishing ability to capture the everyday, the small dramas and joys of life, and to breathe life into objects, Mansfield is considered a key figure in literary modernism. As a true member of this movement, she was obsessed with identity, a central theme in her work. Under the title 'Stories and Short Prose', the publisher Páginas de Espuma has compiled all her stories, in chronological order, that had not been translated into Spanish, along with texts and notes from her notebooks.

Patricia Díaz Pereda, responsible for the edition and translation of all the writings gathered in this volume, believes there is a parallel between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, who said she was the only person whose writing she envied. However, beyond the similarities between the two, Díaz Pereda argues that a distorted image of the New Zealand writer's personality has taken hold: "We have been sold an image of Mansfield as an almost spiritual, ethereal, fragile figure, as if she were a flame burning on a plane beyond the mundane. This image was cultivated and promoted by her husband after her death," Díaz asserts.

However, this false and arbitrary portrayal is contradicted by the comments of those who truly knew her. Virginia Woolf's husband described her as a fun, ironic, and worldly person. "Mansfield was a woman who had love affairs, who showed skepticism towards gender roles, who worked in various trades, even in cabarets in London, to make a living," the editor argues, adding that the narrator suffered from pronounced emotional ups and downs.

Upon her death, the writer left behind 57 notebooks that should have ended up in the fire, according to the instructions she gave to her husband, John Middleton Murry, who ultimately ignored her wish and sent them to the press, albeit heavily distorted and manipulated. He first presented them as a diary, which they never were, and then retouched and even invented stories. From this interference comes the image of Mansfield as a fragile and almost angelic being. "This raises a debate about his intention: for some, he wanted to honor her and ensure her work endured; for others, he simply sought to profit at her expense."

According to the expert, Mansfield's narrative, author of titles such as 'In a German Pension' (1911), 'Bliss' (1920), and 'The Garden Party' (1922), stands out for its observational skill and creation of atmospheres, as well as an extreme care for the musicality of prose. Not surprisingly, as a child, she aspired to be a cellist. Her stories are especially worked and polished, each word placed purposefully to sound a certain way. She also placed great importance on the motif of mirrors, while being fascinated by objects, which she endowed with their own life. "If epiphanies are very relevant in James Joyce, in Katherine Mansfield, the intimate revelations that assault the character through an apparently trivial event stand out."

To create this book, Díaz Pereda started from a two-volume edition by the University of Edinburgh, which contains 220 pieces dated between 1898 and 1922, of which around 80 remained unpublished in Spanish. Among them are stories, but also fragments of various kinds and unfinished tales.

According to the translator, Mansfield can be considered a groundbreaking writer, as she challenged the tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian novel, which was very attached to realism. "As Woolf also did, Mansfield fragments the structure of the story, so that the plot is not the most important thing. This represents a break with narrative linearity, which helps to represent the character's internal subjectivity, a technique present in T. S. Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf."

In her notebooks, the author was much bolder than in the stories that saw the light. Díaz Pereda argues that in those papers she tackled thorny and scandalous topics for the time. She cites as an example an incestuous rape that "she probably would never have published in her lifetime."

On a return trip to New Zealand, the writer set out to shake the rigid conventions of Wellington society by engaging in romantic and sexual adventures with both men and women. However, unlike the Bloomsbury group, she did not make her bisexuality a banner of advocacy, but confined this aspect of her life to the private sphere.