The letters of Katherine Mansfield
by Katherine Mansfield, "Vincent OSullivan", Margaret Scott
Category: Literary Collections

Since the publication of the first volume of the Collected Letters, reviewers and scholars have more and more come to regard Mansfield as a central figure in the emergence of the modernist sensibility. The New York Book Review even claims her as 'the representative twentieth century woman'. Certainly her letters are now read as key modernist documents, as valuable and as finely written as her stories. Selections from her letters more than fifty years ago were aninspiration to de Beauvoir and Camus. They are now, in their full edition, prized by ordinary readers as much as by feminists and literary critics. The letters from Mansfield'slast year, following her worsening illness and the inevitability of its conclusion, become a harrowing but deeply admirable demonstration of courage, wit, independence, and an intense drive towards total honesty. As Hilary Spurling summed up an earlier volume, 'The narrowness of the sickroom did not so much contract as enlarge Mansfield's inner world. As her body lowered her defences, so in a sense did her imagination.' This is perhaps as close as we might get to a record a woman attempting tothink clearly, warmly, busily, until virtually the last breath.