The Annotated Notebooks of Katherine Mansfield 1895 – July 1908 with Commentary

Abstract

This thesis presents the first fully annotated compilation of all the extant writings, other than letters, from Katherine Mansfield's early life, up to her final departure from New Zealand in July l908. Drawing together the manuscript and typescript material in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, and the Newberry Library, Chicago, and other fragments, together with her published work from this period, has resulted in the first complete chronological survey of her early writing. As a result, some important aspects of her life and work are revealed more fully than was previously possible. The annotations seek to amplify this picture of her early development as a writer. A reconstruction of events between 1906 and 1908 (Appendix B) places this development in the context of a detailed chronology derived from notebooks and diaries, letters and other contemporary sources, both published and unpublished. This also reveals the duality of her existence in Wellington during that period more clearly. The essays in the Commentary analyse and further interpret the original materials. Their argument is to demonstrate the full importance of this period which has been generally underestimated, partly as a result of J.M. Murry's highly selective editing of her notebooks for his editions of The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927, 1954). They assert that many of the characteristics of her work, often thought to derive from her late English and European experiences and influence are, in fact, already evident here in her formative years, partly as a result of her extensive and perceptive reading, her deliberate literary experimentation and her intuitive response to her environment. Thus her 'passion for technique', her aim to capture the essence of the 'interrupted moment' or 'glimpse', the fluidity of light and shade, her exploration of themes such as 'otherness' and alienation, her concern for women, and her recognition of the rich potential of her New Zealand experience as a subject for fiction, and her instinctive recognition of certain key images, can all be clearly identified in these early writings, fragmentary, tentative and clumsy though they may be. It is clear too that her confessional intimate diary entries and her journal observations of the world around her already informed her fiction, so weaving together a richly patterned text. Mansfield's art is now recognised as a major and original contribution to the Modernist literary movement. Its main directions, this thesis argues, were laid down before she sailed from Wellington at the age of nineteen.