‘We Talked about Solitude’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Affective Bonding

Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.¹ Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s Solitude (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.² This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.³

If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate par excellence, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.⁴ Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.⁵

Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.⁶ Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic genius loci – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at once a passionate feeling of (or claim to) singularity, an uncompromised only-ness, and a culturally encoded ‘repertoire of actions and statements […] postures and signs’ that can evoke the heat of genuine frisson or seem like tepid clichés.⁷ In singling out the one, solitude gestures towards the universal, connoting island and ‘continent’, one Mansfield standing out to sea and ‘mortal millions that live alone’ in ‘the shoreless watery wild’.⁸ Solitude seems like a landscape where we travel alone but it is characterised by discursive landmarks and pocked with others’ steps. Thus, this paper not only traces the connections between Mansfield and Woolf’s thoughts on solitude, but also tracks their course through a wider cultural and literary horizon. Solitude emerges as a fluid network of feeling, characterised by expressive norms and emotional protocols that are ‘repeatedly undone by the very wildness’ of its ebbs and flows.⁹

Solitude and literature have been deeply wedded in the Western cultural imaginary, as solitude is often considered an essential precondition for creativity, marking a writer’s commitment to their craft. We might, for instance, think of Henry James sententiously advising the aspiring writer to inscribe ‘one word’ ‘upon your banner … that word is Loneliness’.¹⁰ James’s self-advertising tone aside, Woolf often subscribes to this idea, remarking that ‘solitude will be good for a new book’ for ‘it is likely that the best [phrases] are made in solitude’.¹¹ Moreover, her seminal essay, A Room of One’s Own, contends that, throughout history, too few women have had the privilege of uninterrupted solitude or an income of £500 with which to purchase an escape from the voice of that ‘eternal’ patriarchal ‘pedagogue’ ‘which cannot let women alone’.¹² Although Mansfield did not explicitly frame the need for solitude in gendered terms (and, as a perpetual boarder, knew a room of one’s own could be rented for less), she also valued spatial privacy. ‘[T]o be alone’, she notes, was one of ‘2 essentials to my writing – endless time no fires to attend to, no-one to wait for … I’d better find a room in London quickly – and £5 with which to furnish it’.¹³ Woolf and Mansfield’s efforts to reclaim solitude as a space of independence, individuation, and personal growth have been a perennial touchstone for literary, sociological, and philosophical studies that highlight solitude’s positive functions as revitalising social critique and creative resource.¹⁴

This entry vacillates between rapture and refusal as Katherine riffs on the French expression, ‘la solitude est la reine de mon cœur’, opting for the less exact translation, ‘loneliness’.¹⁶ In both authors’ writings about solitude, we find them slipping between cognates and casting about amongst clichés to express the turbulent valences of their own feelings. Indeed, some passages leave the reader with a profound sense of isolation without naming any feeling at all, relying instead on the simultaneously empty but pregnant cry – ‘oh, oh, oh’.¹⁷ This tendency to ‘move among’ and even relinquish ‘names’ in search of ‘some more appropriate predicate’ shows that expressions of feeling are, in Charles Altieri’s words, characterised by ‘a continual struggle between a sense of inchoateness and the forms of intelligibility provided by our social grammars’.¹⁸

We might venture to say that solitude reveals a unique dimension of this struggle. The difficulty of expressing solitude is not only to do with an inadequate or messy vernacular, but with the fact that a vernacular necessarily originates in a community and solitude seems like an intimation of distance or difference from others that craves its own idiolect. Isolates may find themselves in the same situation as theorists like Brian Massumi, who has sought to develop a language that directs attention to an experiential ‘excess or remainder’ that does not fit into ‘socially recognised lines of actions and reactions’ or confining emotional categories. Hence, Massumi famously distinguishes between ‘the socio-linguistic fixing of [a] quality of an experience’, a naming process whereby feelings become ‘owned and recognized’ as emotions, and ‘asignifying’ intensities he calls ‘affects’.¹⁹ Massumi’s distinction may be a little too tidy; as Sianne Ngai observes, ‘the difference between affect and emotion’ may well be ‘a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality and kind’.²⁰ However, it betokens a desire to distinguish between the unruliness of feeling and normative models of the emotions, which have emerged out of long historical struggles over diagnostic criteria that allow us to not only identify but invest ourselves in states of feeling that can be recognised and assessed by others. I wonder whether the speaking isolate is not uniquely situated to observe the gap between affect and emotion (in my opinion, more thought-provoking than secure) as well as how they bleed into each other. Isolates may feel that they are living in the ‘remainder’ that the concept of affect gestures towards, ‘the unexpected, the singular, or […] quirky’ aspects of experience rather than ‘the generally applicable’.²¹ Yet if they are to express and take ownership of solitude, they must engage with the emotional frameworks that qualify particular sorts of selves, solitary or otherwise. If they tend to squirm a little, no wonder, since discourses on solitude are often condensed into aphorisms and clichés that have lost much of their pith and energy in the course of public circulation. Faced with an overdetermined vernacular, the isolate is forced to navigate the ineffable only-ness of their feelings and the thorny places where these singular intensities brush up against the social. Thus, like affect, the isolate sits on the precarious boundary between the public and the private, the individual and the social (albeit with some vested interest in preserving it).

If the isolate tends to test their feelings against social grammars and feel about for the parameters of the self, it is because solitude is deeply connected to ideas of authenticity. I do not mean to say that solitude is exempt from artifice, or to privilege it as more real and pure than other feelings, but it often feels like an exceptionally authentic part of the self, the self’s most sincere testament. Woolf broaches this issue in The Waves, where Bernard contrasts his shifting identity, dependent on ‘the illumination of other people’s eyes’, with ‘the authentics’ who ‘exist most completely in solitude’.²² Likewise, Mansfield relied on solitude ‘to puzzle out’ her ‘own particular self’ – ‘[w]hat I aim at is that state of mind when I feel my soul and my mind are one. … Only solitude will do it for me’.²³ Solitude seems to bring the self to a peak of concentration so that we exist in emphatic totality, absorbed in ‘that sense of being which is so extreme in solitude’ and temporarily lost to all the distinctions whereby we gauge authenticity and parcel out the self into zones that are deemed more or less personal and inviolable (like the body, mind, or soul).²⁴ Yet while solitude seems to consolidate the self, it is often experienced as self-displacement or surprise, seizing us unawares. Although my solitude seems specific to me, I do not seem to be its origin. Similarly, though some critics suggest that solitude ‘produces individuals’, an ‘I’ is not necessarily its result.²⁵ In Woolf’s experience of ‘solitude’, identity seems to ebb away ‘into deep waters’ and ‘it is not oneself but something in the universe that one’s left with’.²⁶ Thus, solitude places pressure on the authentic self it evokes, prompting us to ask whether solitude stakes out some indigenous territory we can legitimately define as personal or whether, like affect, it reveals our susceptibility to migratory intensities stemming from ‘impersonal, or […] “pre-personal” forces’?²⁷

Just as solitude is linked to the authentic individual, modernism has been defined by an interest in individual experience. As Woolf writes in ‘Modern Fiction’, many modernists tried to discard ‘the conventions which are commonly observed’ and ‘record […] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.²⁸ They sought to distinguish unique feelings from emotional norms through experimental works that reflect the vibrant flow of one’s inner life. Thus, modernism seems rather partial to the idea that ‘art […] is the rediscovery of solitude, and the road back into the individual self’.²⁹ However, Woolf and Mansfield were sceptical of any art that ‘remains centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond’.³⁰ This famous caveat from ‘Modern Fiction’, which immediately qualifies Woolf’s call to record personal impressions, may have been inspired by one of Mansfield’s reviews. A year earlier, Mansfield had contended that writers must not be content to ‘register’ the individual’s ‘faint inward shock[s]’, those ‘experiences which are, as it were, peculiarly theirs’. Such an art would leave us enclosed within a ‘tiny circle’, like that envisioned in ‘Modern Fiction’.³¹ Both authors sought a style that would capture ‘the effect of things upon one’s mind’ and yet portray these effects as affects (in our contemporary parlance), resonances between the self and the outside world. Else, Woolf observes, the writer ‘“lives alone, / Housed in a dream, at distance from the / Kind”’.³²

Glossing over whether this exquisite ‘fit’ between self and things is altogether seamless or a matter of nipping and tucking, these isolates suggest that nature is not simply a surrogate for society and its difficult compacts and compromises. The isolate’s experience in the natural world models a better, organic community that operates by the principle of complete integration, not only resolving any splits in the self but also the more fundamental split between self and world. The permeability of hands and peaches and souls and boughs admits no barrier of difference, raising the question of whether the isolate’s pleasures are finally autoerotic, a matter of voluptuous self-gratification rather than a real engagement with otherness. Although Marvell exclaims, ‘Fair trees! wheres’e’er your barks I wound, / No name shall but your own be found’, is he actually grafting the name and legend of the human on the non-human world?³⁸

Mansfield and Woolf were heirs to this tradition, demonstrating a deep familiarity with both Marvell and Wordsworth throughout their careers. For Mansfield, ‘W.W’ was one of those ‘people with whom I want to live’ and, in many ways, she did ‘live with’ Wordsworth, incorporating his ode to solitude into her letters and diaries.³⁹ Mansfield’s repeated use of Wordsworthian motifs might explain the Woolfs’ conspicuous mistakes when typesetting Mansfield’s Prelude at the Hogarth Press; they were frequently in error over the title, using the definite article ‘the’, as in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.⁴⁰ Wordsworth was also a significant figure in Woolf’s intellectual development and her frequent allusions to his work show that she was ‘involved in “one continuous unexhausted reading” of the Romantics, particularly of Wordsworth, from childhood to the end of her life’.⁴¹ Similarly, as Marvell was restyled in the twentieth century as the poet laureate of rural solitude, echoes of his poetry can be heard throughout both authors’ work.⁴² They invoke his images of blissful union with nature as well as his desolate ‘deserts of vast eternity’ to contemplate the double-edged nature of solitude.⁴³ Indeed, Mansfield claimed Marvell’s ‘deserts’ as her personal ‘secret’, translating them into an existential threat hovering over the most quotidian experiences.⁴⁴

In Mansfield and Woolf’s conversations with the past (shaped, perhaps, through conversations with each other), we see that to ‘live with’ these eminent poets of solitude was also to revise, rewrite, and disagree with them. Woolf and Mansfield tease out the complications and tensions in earlier paeans to solitude for, like other twentieth-century writers, they often felt immune to solitude’s consolations. If they could relate to Wordsworth’s sublime pleasures in a lonely wood, they could also empathise with Samuel Beckett when he speaks of ‘nature and the human’ as ‘two solitudes’, separated by ‘impassable’, ‘unalterable alienness’.⁴⁵ The pangs of solitude are often magnified (not alleviated) by the natural world, as it seems to coldly forbid the elemental unity advanced by Marvell and Wordsworth. Thus, Mansfield and Woolf’s writing offers much to scholars who see ‘affect’ as proof of our ‘immersion in […] the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations’. Solitude produces a sense of the ‘world’s apparent intractability’ and yet, as we shall see, this intractability is a precondition for a more modest vision of affective coexistence than that offered by antecedent texts of solitude.⁴⁶

The cultural landscape of solitude is characterised by recurrent questions about expressivity and the nature of feeling, tradition and selfhood, our relationship to others and to the non-human world. These questions are also at stake in current work on affect’s ‘[b]indings and unbindings, becomings and un-becomings, jarring disorientations and rhythmic attunements’.⁴⁷ A productive dialogue between solitude and affect can illuminate how solitude contains elements of sociality and may even engender intimacy. Indeed, solitude plays a crucial role in Woolf and Mansfield’s relationship: we find them treading the same ground in fictions antedating and postdating their friendship, in diaries and letters they were unlikely to have shared. The imagistic and thematic parallels between their writings on solitude suggest either the ‘queer’ clairvoyant connection they claim to have shared or conversations that have been lost in the seas of time.⁴⁸

Woolf frequently questioned Mansfield’s sincerity, and pondered the ‘insincere-sincere’ quality of her own affection.⁵² Indeed, authenticity became something of a bugbear in their relationship. Mansfield knew she had a reputation for ‘lies & poses’ and tried to persuade Woolf that she wanted ‘to be scrupulously truthful … without any reserves at all’, even offering to send Woolf her diary.⁵³ Nevertheless, ever self-reflexive, Mansfield believed herself ‘a secretive creature to [her] last bones’ and wondered whether the most intense sympathies between women were ever quite sincere.⁵⁴ She could be needy and passionate, but also scathing about her nearest friends (a trait she shared with Woolf).

In November 1919, Mansfield wrote a now infamous review of Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. Privately, she considered the novel ‘a lie in the soul’, failing to acknowledge the devastating effects of World War I; further, ‘Virginia’ seemed to exemplify pompous gentility, seeming to ‘curtsey, [and] caper to the most delicate airs … I am bored to Hell by it all’.⁵⁵ Circumstances might also account for the vitriol of Mansfield’s repeated complaints. She was in Italy that winter, sequestered, depressed, and wretchedly lonely. She enviously compared her situation with Woolf’s: ‘no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call’.⁵⁶ Some months later, Mansfield reiterated, ‘I used to feel like Virginia but she had Leonard. I had no-one’.⁵⁷ This bitterness seeped into her review of Night and Day and Woolf ‘saw spite in it. A decorous elderly dullard she describes me; Jane Austen up to date’.⁵⁸ The sting was compounded by Mansfield’s failure to respond to her overtures – ‘no thanks, no answers, no enquiries’.⁵⁹

What did they say when they talked about solitude? We can only surmise because this account is, itself, solitary: it has no complement in Mansfield’s diary. Yet it provokes speculation, compressing some hints about how these women conceptualised solitude.

First, Woolf presents solitude as the basis for affective bonding, an experience where we fall into step, feeling both isolated and accompanied. Might we think about solitude as a widespread, free-floating constituency of feeling? This entails conceptualising solitude, not as an absolute state, but as a heterogeneous assemblage or ‘emotion “cluster”’ that incorporates its traditional antonyms – society, intimacy, and meaningful communication – but is not neutralised by them.⁶¹ While both authors tend to write of solitude in absolutist language, this tone seems to derive from the intensity of the feeling rather than from a belief that solitude is utterly unadulterated. For instance, in To the Lighthouse, Mr Ramsay and his son share an unspoken feeling that ‘was always in the back of both of their minds … loneliness […] was for both of them the truth about things’.⁶² The insistent repetition, ‘both’, suggests that loneliness is a profound bond between the two characters but does not cancel out loneliness’s affective force. In an intriguing parallel, To the Lighthouse echoes a passage from an unfinished novel written in 1913, where Mansfield writes of ‘that shadowy loneliness which sometimes seemed to her to be her only true life, the only changeless truth’.⁶³ Woolf was unlikely to have read this manuscript fragment – is this what Mansfield said when she ‘expressed my feelings, as I never heard them expressed’? Does the lonely concord of To the Lighthouse hark back to Woolf’s discovery of another lonely compatriot in May 1920?

Inasmuch as solitude contains degrees of sociability, Woolf implies that solitude is a constitutional, even congenital tendency, lending itself to a taxonomy (a ‘cat kind’). The idea that solitude is the mark of an elect may have its satisfactions, as when a young Woolf placidly remarks, ‘like Wordsworth – like many distinguished people (it is well to be in good company) I find solitude sufficient, strangely so’.⁶⁴ Yet as the speaking isolate declares a stake in this prestigious community, does she lose some of her individuality and authenticity – in a word, her solitude?

Although Mansfield believed that solitude was the key to a ‘real’ self, she also pondered how even the most inward feelings reiterate pre-established scripts and socio-cultural codes. In particular, solitude is bound up with an ‘entire theatrical dynamic of signifying […] behaviors’ and conventions.⁶⁵ In her opinion, ‘[t]he solitary person always acts’; we are drawn ‘to make a larger gesture than would be ours in life, to declaim, to pronounce, to even exaggerate, to persuade ourselves (?) or others (?)’ only to find ‘we are no longer acting’. When we think about Woolf and Mansfield’s conversation, it is tempting to wonder whether Mansfield spoke about how solitude illumines the fine lines between the ‘soul’ and its ‘livery’ (‘no longer borrowed plumage’). Did she discuss the need to put our feelings on show for others and have them recognised as sincere – a remedial bodying forth that might be interpreted as a pose?⁶⁶

Here, some of Mansfield’s multiple selves find a cavern of intimacy, but one self is always ‘apart’, while another hangs aloft and bemoans the pain of a divided being. Especially towards the end of her life, Mansfield was consumed with the idea of shedding what she called her ‘false’ selves and finding moments of ‘direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal’.⁶⁹ If Mansfield recounted this experience during their meeting, it is likely that Woolf would have interpreted her ‘subterfuges’ more generously for she agreed that we are composed of many selves (maybe ‘(more than two thousand)’) but empathised with the desire ‘to be nothing but one self’, ‘a single self, a real self’.⁷⁰ Mansfield and Woolf might have realised that experiences of loneliness alert us to the diffusion and consolidation of selves, our capacity to flow towards things and drift back into isolation.

Accents, patterns, and phrases from their correspondence find their way into texts like ‘Psychology’, a short story published in December 1920 in which Mansfield explores ‘the special thrilling quality of […] friendship’ between an unnamed man and woman.⁷² Her plaintive appeal to Woolf, ‘pray consider how rare it is to find some one […] who desires to be scrupulously truthful with you’, is reiterated in the characters’ desire to make ‘the most of this extraordinary absolute chance’ ‘to be utterly truthful’, ‘utterly sincere’.⁷³ Under the spoken dialogue, Mansfield crafts a model of ideal intimacy; each thought opens up into ellipses that invite the other to complete it; each unspoken sentence is filled with deictic markers that presume the proximity and shareability of a special ‘this’ that requires no explanatory gloss. For a moment, ‘their two minds lay open to each other’, recalling Mansfield’s belief that she could access ‘the strange, trembling, glinting quality of [Woolf’s] mind’.⁷⁴ Yet suddenly, ‘[t]hey faltered, wavered, broke down’. For no apparent reason, their conversation turns into facile ‘chatter’ and they ‘saw themselves as two little grinning puppets jigging away into nothingness’. This estrangement is given a primordial dimension, as if the elements were colluding to thwart human intimacy: ‘there they were – two hunters, bending over their fire, but hearing suddenly from the jungle beyond a shake of wind and a loud, questioning cry’.⁷⁵ The whole world, the ‘dark garden ringed with glittering ivy, the willows, the big bright sky’ seems to pose a ‘question’ – is lasting intimacy possible?⁷⁶

‘Together and Apart’, a short story from Woolf’s unpublished ‘Garsington novel’, reiterates this oscillation between communion and loneliness, focusing on the spoken and unspoken planes of a conversation between Mr Serle and Mrs Anning.⁷⁷ On the level of dialogue, this conversation is simply small talk, focusing on the obvious and the uncontroversial, following regular lines of affirmation and consent. Yet, in the affective landscape underlying speech, the characters’ feelings float ‘capriciously this way and that, like the tentacles of a sea anemone, now thrilled, now snubbed’.⁷⁸ Suddenly, ‘each felt that […] the secluded being, who sits in darkness while his shallow agile companion does all the tumbling and beckoning, and keeps the show going, suddenly stood erect; flung off his cloak; confronted the other’.⁷⁹ In the midst of social performance, comes a moment of authentic encounter with ‘the true man, upon which the false man was built’, and they ‘knew each other so perfectly, were in fact, so closely united that they had only to float side by side down this stream’.⁸⁰ Then, just as suddenly as in ‘Psychology’, Mrs Anning feels ‘the withdrawal of human affection … that paralysing blankness of feeling’.⁸¹

Both stories follow the same rhythm, exploring the theatricality of human relations, the thunderous, naked quality of affective encounter, and the pang of estrangement. Sudden and serendipitous, intimacy and isolation seem to come from outside forces, compromising the characters’ sense of active powers so that they float, jig, and move in time to an affective field that leaves them alternately trembling and enervated. These echoes between Mansfield’s and Woolf’s fictions hint at a longer, indirect conversation about solitude that re-enacts the ebbs and flows of their ‘fragmentary intermittent intercourse’, an intimacy they pondered but could not finally explain.⁸²

Mansfield and Woolf’s renewed accord over solitude was only temporary; by July, Woolf was already exclaiming, ‘Heaven knows, a story by Katherine always manages to put my teeth on edge’.⁸³ Nevertheless, their conversation seems to have prompted Woolf to reassess her response to ‘Bliss’, a story she considered ‘so hard, and so shallow, and so sentimental that I had to rush to the bookcase for something to drink’.⁸⁴ As Katie Macnamara observes, this somewhat intemperate response may be due to the story’s unflattering portrait of Woolf as Pearl Fulton, Bertha’s unfaithful friend.⁸⁵ Pearl’s manner of ‘sitting with her head a little on one side, and smiling’, as if there were ‘something behind it’, recalls Mansfield’s picture of Woolf ‘say[ing], with your head a little on one side, smiling as though you knew some enchanting secret: “Well, Katherine, we shall see …”’.⁸⁶ In ‘Bliss’, Mansfield turns Woolf’s suspicions about her on their head – it is not Bertha/Mansfield but Pearl/Woolf who is guilty of the false smile, her enchanting secrets revealed as bitter deceits. Woolf’s com diary suggests that she resisted drawing direct parallels between life and fiction; she qualifies her vitriolic comments on Mansfield’s ‘callousness & hardness’, asking ‘is it absurd to read all this criticism of her personally into a story?’⁸⁷ Yet ‘Bliss’ has an undeniably personal edge, even as it rounds out into a larger commentary on antecedent texts of solitude (as Woolf might have noticed when she ‘rush[ed] to the bookcase’).

Bertha and Pearl become one with each other and the pear tree, a ‘miraculous’ consummation that extends one intimacy to include the total environment.⁹³ However, moments later, Bertha discovers that Pearl is having an affair with her husband. She rushes to the window, as if expecting to find a ‘straight’ ‘resemblance’ between her shattered hopes and the tree, ‘[b]ut the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still’.⁹⁴ The pear tree interrupts Bertha’s Marvellian idyll with a ‘but’, serving as a riposte to the reciprocity between mind and nature which makes of solitude a ‘happy garden-state’.⁹⁵

Like ‘Bliss’, Woolf’s draft translates a momentous, erotic encounter between women into a shining tree that merges with one’s arms and glows in one’s bosom. Like ‘Bliss’, the scene ends with Miranda ‘looking out […] upon the garden’, feeling a sense of unspeakable disillusionment that seems to encompass female friendship and the world at large: ‘Oh she cried, as if in pain’.⁹⁷ Woolf may have excised this scene from Jacob’s Room because it revealed striking debts to a story she had roundly abused.⁹⁸ It was published as ‘A Woman’s College from Outside’ after Mansfield’s death, when Woolf could say, ‘Katherine’s my rival no longer’.⁹⁹ Still, the published version offers extra hints of its origins as Woolf added a passing swipe at ‘Bertha’, a figure lounging sleepily in a corner with no desire to ‘tunnel into’ the ‘unmoulded richness’ of the night. Incurious, somnolent, part of the ‘flock’, Mansfield/Bertha is effectually neutralised, but Mansfield’s tree obtains a new life, only lightly revised from its second flowering in the July draft of Jacob’s Room.¹⁰⁰

If nature could speak, Woolf and Mansfield imply, it would teach us of our solitude; if humans and trees are alike, they are conjoined by a ‘but’, each alike in their solitude. Yet such shared solitude contains ‘affiliative possibilities’ (as Mansfield and Woolf’s conversation in May had highlighted), becoming ‘a trans-species phenomenon’ rather than a strictly human burden.¹⁰⁵

Moreover, Mansfield suggests that attending to nature’s solitary cries brings us into being, not as a Marvellian soliloquist, but as a listener whose existence depends on a summoning, an appeal, perhaps even a contradiction, from the other. In solitude, ‘it’s as though […] somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time’.¹⁰⁶ For example, in ‘A Married Man’s Story’, a bullied child feels a strange connection to a dead bird; as he strokes its ‘soft, secret down’ and tries to twist its rigid claws into a responsive clasp, the child experiences himself as other and the other as self, as though he were, for ‘the first time […] listening to a silent voice inside a little cage that was me’. Although loneliness seems to belong to and encircle the self, it actually disperses the ‘me’ and distributes feeling across species, objects, and landscapes, entities that this short story calls ‘my silent brothers’.¹⁰⁷

Mansfield and Woolf experienced solitude with a kind of raw conviction, as an intensely personal emotion, ‘deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing’.¹⁰⁸ Yet in the end, solitude may best be conceptualised as an affect circulating through the human and non-human world, a conversation not a soliloquy. When Mansfield and Woolf spoke about solitude, they found themselves repeating each other and speaking in a vernacular that echoes throughout history although, each time, ‘the accent falls a little differently’.¹⁰⁹ This conversation is marked by tender advances, baffled retreats, inarticulate cries, and passionate hearkening to voices from the past and the non-human world.