SOURCE: Kaplan, Sydney Janet. “Rescuing a Reputation.” Women's Review of Books 5, nos. 10-11 (July 1988): 18-19.

[In the following review, Kaplan offers a positive assessment of Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, concluding that Tomalin's book improves upon previous Mansfield biographies by Antony Alpers and Jeffrey Meyers.]

Katherine Mansfield was born on October 14, 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand. It is fitting that Claire Tomalin's long-awaited biography [Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life] should appear this year, the centennial of Mansfield's birth. Katherine Beauchamp (Katherine Mansfield was her pen-name) had a comfortable, privileged childhood as the third daughter in a family of four girls and one boy. Her father was a powerful figure in Wellington, a self-made man who left school at fourteen and eventually became the director of the Bank of New Zealand. Her parents had the foresight—even if it was mainly for social rather than philosophical reasons—to ensure that their daughters were properly educated. Kathleen and her two older sisters were sent to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College, an advanced institution for the education of young women. After three years in London, the Beauchamp sisters returned to New Zealand, but Kathleen was determined to escape from the restrictions of family, colonial life and bourgeois social conventions. She wanted an artistic career and she knew that she needed to be in London to achieve it.

She returned to London in 1908, setting out with a small allowance from her father, to establish herself as a writer. She had some early successes—some stories were published in the leading journal, New Age. Her first book, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911. Two collections appeared later—Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). Other collections of stories, her letters and her Journal were published posthumously.

After a turbulent period of experimentation and upheaval in her personal life, Mansfield settled into a relationship with the critic John Middleton Murry, who became her husband in 1918. Their marriage was intense and filled with conflict; they spent long periods apart, especially in the last years when Mansfield went abroad in search of a climate more compatible with her advancing illness. Her life was productive, eventful and short—tragically short. She died of tuberculosis in 1923 when she was only 34 years old.

While feminist criticism has produced an enormous number of studies of the life and work of Virginia Woolf, it has done much less with Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield's contributions to the development of modern fiction largely have been taken for granted. Her innovations in the short-fiction genre preceded those of Virginia Woolf (especially those of the “plotless” story, the incorporation of the stream of consciousness into the content of fiction and the emphasis on the psychological “moment”) and have been absorbed and assimilated—often unconsciously—by writers and readers of the short story.

Mansfield never was one of the “lost” or “neglected” women writers rediscovered by feminist critics. Her stories have often been included in college anthologies of fiction; if anything, she was the anthologists' token woman. Her predominant use of irony and her insistence on organic unity in fiction made her writing especially amenable to the methods of the New Critics. That scrutiny ensured the continuity of her reputation, but also guaranteed that her work would be treated in isolation from its social, political and historical contexts.

The initial problem for feminist criticism was to rescue Mansfield from everyone's assumed familiarity with her. To do that it was necessary to have reliable biographical data to counter the prevailing view of her place in modern literature. She also needed to be rescued from years of popular legend as a kind of Camille. This latter problem was compounded by her husband's role in creating that legend: after Mansfield's death, John Middleton Murry began to devote a large part of his own career to the editing of her work. He brought out unfinished stories she had never intended for publication; he organized her letters; and he created the document that had the greatest critical influence: the Journal of Katherine Mansfield (published by Knopf in 1927). Murry also wrote many articles—actually testimonials—about their relationship, and allowed these to become sentimental, maudlin and finally untrustworthy as portraits of a real woman. Claire Tomalin pointedly remarks that “unable to control her while she lived, Murry could not resist manipulating her after her death to fit the pattern he preferred.”

The publication at the end of the 1970s of two fully-researched biographies of Katherine Mansfield by Antony Alpers and Jeffrey Meyers altered Murry's portrait of Mansfield, revealing the complexity of her life, her nonconforming sexuality and the difficulties in her relationship with Murry. These books changed the popular conception of Mansfield, but their interpretations of many details of her life seemed to call out for feminist analysis.¹ Claire Tomalin's new biography is a start in the right direction.

While Tomalin does not articulate her analysis of Katherine Mansfield's life in terms of feminist theory, she does center it in her own identification with Mansfield as a woman. Commenting about her decision to resume working on the biography after putting it aside when Alpers' and Meyers' books appeared, Tomalin notes that:

I am of the same sex as my subject. It may be nonsense to believe that this gives me any advantage over a male biographer. Yet I can't help feeling that any woman who fights her way through life on two fronts—taking a traditional female role, but also seeking male privileges—may have a special sympathy for such a pioneer as Katherine, and find some of her actions and attitudes less baffling than even the most understanding of men.

(p. 2)

That “special sympathy” makes itself felt in numerous ways throughout this beautifully written, thoughtful book.

Ultimately, every biography is also a work of “fiction.” In its selectivity it makes a narrative out of the chaos of any given life. It tells a story, and that story is as much a product of its author's impulses and values as it is of its subject's. Tomalin's “story” of Mansfield's life is one about an imagined companion, a person she might have enjoyed knowing, one who, in spite of her volatile personality, would have been a treasured friend: a friend mourned for her early death and terrible suffering, admired for her struggles against a fatal illness and for her drive and conscientiousness as a writer, her determination to continue to use her talents to the very end. These responses to Mansfield are those of a biographer who looks at her subject from a position of equality. This position is not often occupied by Mansfield's previous two biographers, who sometimes appear condescending to their subject and seem to consider her sexuality as deviant or symptomatic of deep-seated psychological problems—though at one point, Anthony Alpers admits: “But these are all guesses, and only a man's guesses. …”

Mansfield's male biographers' “stories” reveal their discomfort with her youthful struggles for independence—a discomfort most apparent when they describe her first experiences as a woman alone in London after her arrival from New Zealand in 1908. Meyers writes:

Katherine's first adult year in Europe was a disastrous period of her life and confirmed all her father's fears. Her violent rebellion against Harold's values was an acknowledgment of his power and influence over her, the reluctant homage of disobedience to authority. Within ten months of her arrival she had had an unhappy love affair with one man, conceived his illegitimate child, married a second man and left him the next day, endured a period of drug addiction and suffered a miscarriage. Though Katherine was afraid of her uncontrollable feelings, she believed she had to “experience” life before she could write about it. But her raw emotion was only thinly veiled by a pose of sophistication, and she abandoned herself to a destructive sexual extremism that expressed both her craving for and her repudiation of men.

(p. 36)

I wonder what Meyers would have said about a young male artist's sexual activity? Sexual experimentation by young men usually is seen as a sign of positive growth, but “destructive sexual extremism” becomes the label for a young woman's insistence on non-virginity! (“Drug addiction,” incidentally, turns out to be only a pathetic dependence on Veronal, prescribed for insomnia—a “treatment,” by the way, frequently given to women at the turn of the century.)

Most revealing is Meyers' assumption that Mansfield's complex and serious-minded questioning of patriarchal standards of feminine behavior—her journal entry in May, 1908, for instance: “It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly” (quoted by Tomalin)—is “an acknowledgement of [her father's] power and influence over her.” Instead of considering Mansfield's recognition of her own sexual needs, Meyers establishes the father's position as more important than the daughter's; hers is primarily reactive. In this way female sexuality can be interpreted—yet again—as the passive response to male authority.

While Meyers entitled his chapter on this period of Mansfield's life “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” and Alpers named it “‘Experience’ and Its Price” in his first biography of Mansfield in 1954, Tomalin situates Mansfield's first days in London under the heading “London 1908: New Women.” This shift in emphasis makes a great difference. Tomalin recognizes that Mansfield's experience was not anomalous, that she “sailed towards London in the summer of 1908 in the joyous mood of the successful rebel” and that she was entering a society “in which the patterns of Victorian life were being thoroughly shaken about, and none more vigorously than the pattern of Victorian womanhood.”

Tomalin introduces us to a London in which the women's movement for suffrage had reached its height, where newspapers and journals were filled with articles debating the changes in women's roles and opportunities and were taking up such issues as marriage reform, the sexual rights of women and the question of compulsory motherhood. How Katherine Mansfield tried to find a place for herself in the midst of that creative tumult, how she became a part of the artistic-literary world of the early modernists—as a contributor to the iconoclastic journal, New Age, and through her friendships with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf—and how she struggled to perfect her writing through years of increasingly debilitating illness, are flawlessly conveyed in this fine book.

Tomalin carefully describes Mansfield's education at Queen's College, her subsequent struggle to achieve independence from her wealthy, colonial family, her loves and friendships with other women and her ultimately unsatisfactory relationship with John Middleton Murry. Although she also discusses the negative effects of Mansfield's belief in “experience” as a prerequisite for artistic creativity, Tomalin recognizes more fully than either Alpers or Meyers the feminist implications of Mansfield's quest: “for it was largely through her adventurous spirit, her eagerness to grasp at experience and to succeed in her work, that she became ensnared in disaster. Her short life, so modern and busy, has the shape of a classic tragedy.”

One of the strongest sections of the book is Tomalin's treatment of Mansfield's medical history. She understands the difficulties of women who shattered sexual conventions at a time before reliable methods of birth-control and antibiotics were available. (It's not coincidental that Tomalin is also the author of a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, that great feminist writer whose career, like Mansfield's, was ended prematurely: for Wollstonecraft it was death in childbirth.) Tomalin makes a convincing case for the theory that Mansfield's tuberculosis was the end-result of a process that began years earlier when she contracted gonorrhea, probably from Floryan Sobieniowski, a Polish writer, with whom she had an affair in 1909. Misdiagnosed and mistreated, gonorrhea attacked her body, producing painful illnesses of her joints and heart, and lowered her resistance to a new, more deadly invader: the tuberculosis bacillus.

There are many other strengths to this book. Tomalin's refusal to psychologize is refreshing and invigorating. She does not search for some trauma in Mansfield's childhood to account for her spirit of adventure, her bisexuality, or her refusal to conform to conventional gender roles. It is not that Tomalin ignores such familial matters as the daughter's relationship with her emotionally distant mother or her rebellion against her father's values and his control of the family through money and social position. (Interestingly, Tomalin devotes much less space to Mansfield's father than either Alpers or Meyers.) But she interprets these familial interactions within the larger framework of social history, and especially of the history of middle-class English women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That grounding in social reality, combined with Tomalin's gift for conveying the mood and spirit of individual incidents in Mansfield's life, make this a fascinating and moving book.

Note

1. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (New York: New Directions, 1980); Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Viking, 1980). Alpers' book is a complete revision of his earlier Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1954).