Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield

The appeal of Katherine Mansfield's work knows no geographical boundaries. All of her writings remain in print, she is widely read, taught, and anthologized throughout the world, and her work has been translated into diverse languages. The essays in this volume chart the response to Mansfield's work across time and place. Included are the earliest reviews of her writing from the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as pieces exemplifying modern critical approaches to her work. Born in New Zealand in 1888, Katherine Mansfield left Wellington when she was nineteen to begin a career as a writer in London. In the years that followed, she received critical acclaim and counted among her friends T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley. Since her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1923, her writings have drawn increasingly varied critical attention. Through a collection of essays and reviews, this volume traces the critical response to Mansfield's writings. The volume includes the earliest reviews of her work in 1911 through the most recent examinations of her fiction. Though the pieces included are written in English, some essays discuss her links with Europe and with French, German, and Asian critics. An introductory essay and chronology briefly overview the critical reception of her work, and a selected bibliography lists bibliographical, biographical, and critical studies.

JAN PILDITCH is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.