GUTS – Katherine Mansfield as a Reviewer

Abstract

The paper begins by engaging with recent reviews of volume five of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, challenging the principles on which the reviews were written and questioning the assumption of personal intimacy that reviewers, critics and biographers often make in relation to Mansfield. Her role as a reviewer for the Athenaeum is then analysed, principally using reviews that were not covered by Clare Hanson in her selection of Mansfield's critical writing. Initially the paper considers Mansfield's experience as a reviewer and editor during the Rhythm period, and the significance for her of the Fauvist aesthetic of that journal. Mansfield's ruthless scrutiny of the fiction of contemporaries is examined for what it reveals about her own practice, and is then applied to two particular themes in her fiction, the depiction of children and of the secret self, here specifically in relation to tuberculosis. The opportunities that were not offered to Mansfield, perhaps because she was seen as an une...