Katherine Mansfield: Letters and Journals

Description

Title: Katherine Mansfield: Letters and Journals
Editor: C. K. Stead
Publisher: Vintage (Penguin Random House New Zealand)
Format: Paperback
Condition: Good — discolouration to pages. Small tidy name printed internal page

Description:

“Now — now I want to write recollections of my own country. Yes, I want to write about my own country till I simply exhaust my store. Not only because it is a ‘sacred debt’ that I pay to my country because my brother and I were born there, but also because in my thoughts I range with him over all the remembered places. I am never far away from them. I long to renew them in writing.”

Mansfield wrote that from Europe, where she spent almost all of her adult life and where she died of tuberculosis at 34. She never returned to New Zealand after 1908. The New Zealand she gave to literature — the Wellington and Karori of Prelude, At the Bay, The Garden Party — was the New Zealand of memory and longing, held together in letters, and in the private pages of the journals she kept in sickrooms in France and Switzerland.

This selection brings together the letters and journals that best illuminate how that transformation happened — from the childhood in Karori and Thorndon, through the literary friendships with Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, through the death of her brother Leslie in France in 1915, through the years of illness and the extraordinary productivity that ran alongside them. It is the only selection available that combines material from both forms, and it was compiled by C. K. Stead — NZ’s most significant Mansfield scholar — to serve as the most illuminating entrance to her private voice.

Her published stories are the destination. These letters and journals are the road she travelled to get there.

Why We Stock It:

Katherine Mansfield is the most internationally celebrated New Zealand writer who ever lived. The letters and journals are where she wrote about home — from the other side of the world, looking back at a country she could not stop writing about and never managed to return to. That story belongs on The Gravy’s shelf.