Shunned by the Bloomsbury group, Katherine Mansfield was one of the 20th century’s most fearless and funny writers. And she paid dearly for the freedoms she claimed
How and why did Katherine Mansfield provoke such violent extremes of admiration and hostility, both during her life and after it? Fifty years after her death, the BBC television series A Picture of Katherine Mansfield gave a fair example of her reputation in 1973. Tall, intense Vanessa Redgrave played Mansfield; short, baffled Annette Crosbie her devoted dogsbody friend Ida Baker (known as LM), with Jeremy Brett as Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry taking off his glasses whenever he had to express emotional inadequacy – which was frequently. In an accompanying Radio Times interview, the 85-year-old LM, literal-minded to the end, said the series hadn’t seemed realistic to her as Katherine had been shorter than her; she had been the tall one. (One of Mansfield’s less than kind nicknames for LM had been The Mountain.) The biopic broadly followed Murry’s drive to establish his late wife as a sort of secular saint and her final wish to make something visionary of her death, which enraged those who had known her and perplexed new readers who had found her work funny and beautiful before coming into contact with the myth.
A flock of biographies followed, the finest two presenting startlingly different portraits of Mansfield. New Zealander Antony Alpers’s epic 1980 life was sympathetic to the point of avuncular. The reader cannot but flinch at his account of the passionate gifted girl launching herself thousands of miles from home on a handful of Oscar Wilde’s least helpful aphorisms. In an early notebook she had copied out “Push everything as far as it can go”, and “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it” and so on (with her own, too, written in imitation: “Never relight a dead cigarette or an old passion”).
