Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’
- 1 The New Age: Gender, Nation and Empire
- 2 Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism
- 3 The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)
- 4 The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’
- 1 The New Age: Gender, Nation and Empire
- 2 Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism
- 3 The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)
- 4 The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
On 9 January 1923, Katherine Mansfield died at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Fontainebleau, established by the mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff, at the age of just thirty-four. In his letter of condolence to Murry, D. H. Lawrence was uncharacteristically generous, suggesting that ‘[p]erhaps it is good for Katharine [sic] not to have seen the next phase’: ‘It has been a savage enough pilgrimage these last four years. Perhaps K. has taken the only way for her. We keep faith – I always feel death only strengthens that, the faith between those who have it.’ In the same letter, Lawrence also told Murry that he would ask his publisher to send his latest work, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which he wished Mansfield could have read: ‘She’ll know though’, he wrote. ‘The dead don't die. They look on and help.’
This was a defining moment for Murry. In February 1923, he retreated to the solitude of a cottage in the forest of Twyford in Sussex, where he read Fantasia of the Unconscious as he came to terms with his grief. It was here, inspired by Lawrence's descriptions of primary pre-mental consciousness, that Murry underwent a profound mystical experience that he later described as ‘the one entirely revolutionary happening’ in his life. This experience seemed to confirm Murry in the belief that the ‘dead don't die’ but instead ‘look on and help’. In July 1923, he recounted these events:
Not many months ago I lost someone whom it was impossible for me to lose – the only person on this earth who understood me or whom I understood. This impossible thing happened. Katherine Mansfield died. For a fortnight I lived in a dream. […]
I began to be aware that there was something I must do. At first it was simply that I must go away. Then it hardened and became clearer: I must be alone. Not merely have loneliness thrust on me by the high gods, as it had been, but achieve and perfect it in myself and by myself. And then, knowing this, I was terribly afraid. […]
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- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture , pp. 243 - 260Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018