In 1918, as four years of war came to an end, there arrived another unexpected threat: the so-called ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic. Between January 1918–March 1920 there were three waves of this deadly strain of influenza, with the most devastating peak in October 1918. At this time, Katherine Mansfield was living in Hampstead, in close proximity to an epidemic which flashed through London life and affected many of her contemporaries. Although Mansfield only tangentially engaged with the pandemic in her letters and diaries, I contend that she would have been aware of the ripple effect of Spanish flu, and that this universal threat imbues her post-pandemic writing. I will examine her story ‘Revelations’ (1920) through a pandemic lens, revealing how her writing is inflected with anxiety around contagion and loss. I also suggest that Mansfield herself may have succumbed to Spanish flu, an illness which could have played a part in the worsening of her tuberculosis.

Spanish flu became the war's shadow, a terrifying ‘dark angel’, during which, as Elizabeth Outka asserts in Viral Modernism: ‘the domestic space became as deadly as the front lines’. The result of this double trauma is that the pandemic has been largely overlooked in both the political and social history of our times. Critical consensus underlines this startling absence: Susan Sontag draws attention to ‘the near-total historical amnesia about the influenza pandemic’, Laura Spinney is astonished by ‘our collective forgetting of the greatest massacre of the 20th century’, while Mark Honigsbaum notes how it is a struggle to find ‘many novels, songs or works of art from the period that refer to the 1918 pandemic’. Although this silence around Spanish flu is largely reflected in its absence in cultural works, Spinney suggests that the influenza outbreak ‘was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail’. The pandemic's effects on culture may not be overt, but that doesn't mean its traces can't be detected – there are ways in which the pandemic may have silently contributed to the post-war cultural fascination with death, loss and mourning.