Journal - Softcover

Mansfield, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903155592 ISBN 13: 9781903155592

Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

In July 1942 Irène Némirovsky, author of the
now-bestselling Suite Française, wrote in her notebook on her last day of
freedom before she was deported by the Nazis, `The pine woods all around
me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves,
wet and rotting from last night's storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs
tucked under me! In my bag I have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the
Journal of KM and an orange.'

Katherine Mansfield's Journal is one of the great classics of
twentieth century literature but has not been in print for many years. Yet
it is a uniquely truthful record of a great writer at work, of the spirit
of a genius in the last ten years of her life, and of the development of
the modern mind during the early years of the last century.

Most people will have read Katherine Mansfield's stories. The Journal
was compiled by her husband John Middleton Murry soon after she died and
was published in 1927. It consists of fragments of diary entries, unposted
letters, scraps of writing, in other words anything that was dated or could
have a date attributed to it and that could be woven into a volume called a
`journal'.

Katherine Mansfield had not thought of posterity reading anything she
wrote apart from her short stories; indeed, she asked Murry to publish `as
little as possible'. But failure to destroy something is quite different
from meaning something to be read by others; which is why Dorothy Parker
said of the Journal, `so private is it that one feels forever guilty of
prying for having read it.' For it is indeed an intimate and
self-revelatory record of a writer's mind, far more intimate, surely, than
Katherine would have wanted it to be had she known it would be published.

Thus, unusually for its time, the Journal is honest, sharp, tragic and
over-sensitive: but a writer's sharpness and over-sensitivity, not a
gossip's or a politician's or a mother's. When the Journal was first
published in 1927 the poet Conrad Aiken said: `It is a fascinating, and
extraordinary, and in some respects an appalling book. And again and again
one is reminded of Keats.' Partly he meant this because both died of
consumption and he was referring to the consumptive temperament; partly
because both were creative geniuses; and partly because both explored the
art, the act, of writing every time they put pen to paper.

As in Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and then her complete Letters
and Diaries, or in Keats's Letters, the reader can watch the act of
creation as it happens in the mind of the writer who was above all else
`rooted in life'. This is why so many saw Katherine Mansfield as an ideal.
Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward, for example, bracketed her with
Wilfred Owen and Emily Bronte: `We talked about them as if they were our
personal friends, wondered what they would have said on certain occasions,
or how they would have behaved, what advice they would have given us.'

Katherine Mansfield's Journal is far more than an intermittent record
of twelve years of a writer's life: it is intensely observant,
self-critical, self-chastising, confessional, atmospheric, agonised and
funny, an essential document for anyone interested in women's writing of
the last century and in one of its greatest writers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1903155592
• ISBN 13: 9781903155592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288