Katherine Mansfield and London

Katherine Mansfield’s complicated relationship with London began in 1903, when her parents sent her and her two older sisters from New Zealand to Queen’s College in Harley Street to be educated, and where they remained until the summer of 1906. As soon as she was back in Wellington, she longed to return, her parents finally agreeing to her returning to London to forge a career as a writer, no longer ’Kathleen Beauchamp’ but ’Katherine Mansfield’. As an adult, Mansfield had a love/hate relationship with London, but it remained central to her literary career. Mansfield became part of a literary couple with John Middleton Murry, and together they forged connections with most of the important writers in London at that time, thanks to their editorship of several little magazines and their own published work. As the symptoms of Mansfield’s tuberculosis increased, and she spent more and more time away from England, seeking a healthier climate, life in London became a series of brief sojourns. It remained, however, at the heart of her literary life until her early death.

This book combines a range of cutting-edge scholarship on themes including Mansfield’s school life, telephony, the weather, literary sources and influences, music, and hotels, also including reviews of relevant publications in the field, a diverse range of creative writing, and the first publication of notes by Mansfield’s early friend and contemporary in London, Margaret Wishart.

Aimée Gasston is author of Modernist Short Fiction and Things (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and co-editor, with Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, of Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.