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| (Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press) |
“Books are the mirrors of the soul. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell the truth about other people.”
—Virginia Woolf
“I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s familiar real life, to find the treasure in that.”
—Katherine Mansfield
I will readily admit that I was woefully late in coming to the awareness that writers such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were remarkably experimental in the manner and mode with which they assumed an ascendency among the most prominent and important members of the literary modernist canon of the 20th century. I suppose I fell under the sway of louder modernists (for lack of a better word) such as rabble-rousers like James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis. But Woolf and especially Mansfield were far quieter modernists, though they shook up the stylistic status quo with equal fervour and daring aplomb. It didn’t help her status that Mansfield concentrated almost exclusively on the short story, or that she died painfully young, thirty-four, of tuberculosis in 1923, just as modernism itself was building up its full head of steam. So I’m delighted to report that Gerri Kimber’s new biography of Mansfield, called A Hidden Life, released by Reaktion Books and University of Chicago Press, manages to correct an abundance of gaps in our appreciation of just who she was and what she accomplished in her sad but turbulent life.