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
Introduction: ‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’
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
My literary career began with short-story writing in New Zealand. I was nine years old when my first attempt was published. I have been filling notebooks ever since. After I came to London I worked for some time for The New Age, and published In a German Pension in 1912 [sic]. It was a bad book, but the press was kind to it. Later, I worked with my present husband, Mr John Middleton Murry, editor of The Athenaeum, but at that time editor of Rhythm and The Blue Review. In the past two years I have reviewed novels for The Athenaeum, and I have written more short stories.
Katherine Mansfield viewed her literary career through the prism of periodical publication. Written in the summer of 1921, the above draft of a letter composed in one of her notebooks provides a striking illustration of how Mansfield presented her credentials to others and assessed her reputation as a writer prior to the publication of her most successful short story collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, in that annus mirabilis of literary modernism, 1922. Comprising satirical sketches first printed in the political weekly The New Age, Mansfield's first short story collection, In a German Pension, was published at the end of 1911. It was another nine years before she published another book, with Bliss and Other Stories appearing in December 1920. In the intervening years, however, Mansfield was prolific in her output, contributing work to ‘little magazines’ such as Rhythm, The Blue Review and The Signature, to established periodicals such as The New Age and The Athenaeum, as well as making brief appearances in diverse publications such as T.P.'s Weekly, The Saturday Westminster Gazette, The Times Literary Supplement and The English Review. Before the publication of The Garden Party in 1922, therefore, it was as a contributor to magazines and periodicals on which Mansfield's reputation hinged; indeed, even with The Garden Party in circulation, Wyndham Lewis could still describe her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. Encompassing a dismissive attitude towards Mansfield's nationality as well as disdain for the kind of mass-market magazines for which she was beginning to write, Lewis's comment was certainly not meant as a compliment, but his pithy characterisation speaks volumes about how Mansfield was viewed by her contemporaries.
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- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture , pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018