Katherine Mansfield and World War One

Examines Katherine Mansfield’s engagement with the First World War and its impact on her writings This special issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies is in remembrance of the centenary of one of the most significant events of the modernist period. Like the reclamation of women’s war writings that we have already seen in relation to Virginia Woolf and others, Mansfield’s literary response to the key political event of her time is fundamental to our understanding of her developing writerly style. It is in her responses to the war that we find a ‘political Mansfield’, and the articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, the contributions to this volume refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of the war on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of the war on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism. This volume helps develop our ideas of what constitute war writings and, in so doing, expands the scope of Mansfield scholarship and the field of First World War studies.

Alice Kelly is the Harmsworth Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her critical edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage, Fighting France was published by EUP in December 2015 and she co-edited a Special Issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies on ‘Katherine Mansfield and the First World War’ (EUP, September 2014). Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, and the author of Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life (2025), Katherine Mansfield – The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015), and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is the Series Editor of the 4-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16). Together with Claire Davison, she has edited the 4-volume edition of Katherine Mansfield’s complete letters for EUP (2020–25). Isobel Maddison is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, where she is a College Lecturer and the Director of Studies in English. She works primarily on female modernism and on the connections between modernism and popular fiction. Isobel has published on Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield, and is the author of Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (2013), the first full length treatment of this author, plus several essays on this writer. Isobel is President of the International Elizabeth von Arnim Society. A Professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin’s primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group. Delia da Sousa Correa is Professor of Literature and Music at the Open University and co-convenor of the OU’s Literature and Music Research Group. She studied in New Zealand, London, and Oxford and previously taught at the universities of Oxford and St Petersburg. Her research explores connections between literature and music in the Victorian and early-modernist periods.