Book description
Spanning three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield
during the First World War, this novel follows the ups and downs of her
relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to write the
"new kind of fiction" which she felt the times demanded. She
is restless, constantly on the move, in and out of London, to and from
France, even, once, into the war zone to be with her French lover,
novelist Francis Carco. For a short time, Mansfield is able to behave as
though the war is merely "background", but her ardent
relationship with her brother, who arrives from New Zealand to fight in
France, makes detachment impossible - as does her love for Jack's Oxford
friend Frederick Goodyear, also a soldier. The war's shadow
remorselessly darkens all their lives, but only increases Mansfield's
determination to break through as a writer. While sticking scrupulously
to what is known about Mansfield's life and those of her friends (a cast
that includes D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Dora
Carrington, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline
Morrel and Virginia Woolf), this novel is extraordinary in taking the
reader beyond the point of biography into the mind, emotions and
sensibility of its subject. It is a sharp, subtle and appealing portrait
of the person of whose work Virginia Woolf wrote: "It was the only
writing I was ever jealous of." C. K. Stead was Professor of
English at the University of Auckland until 1986. In 1984, he was
awarded the CBE for services to New Zealand literature. He has published
ten volumes of poetry, two volumes of stories and several works of
criticism, and edited the Penguin Modern Classics Letters and Journals
of Katherine Mansfield (1977). Mansfield is his tenth novel.
