Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Katherine Mansfield: The View from France J. Lawrence Mitchell Kimber, Gerri. Katherine Mansfield: The View from France. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. 290 pp. $72.95 (paper). Has anyone ever satisfactorily explained why the reputations of some authors flourish more abroad than at home? Gerri Kimber’s recent book tackles the issue, asking “why [Katherine] Mansfield’s reputation in France has always been greater than in England” (19). There is certainly plenty of evidence that Mansfield found France hospitable: it was a refuge of sorts from England, a place she could work, and she was drawn back to it increasingly over the years. Kimber calls the second chapter of her book “Falling for France” and cites as an epigraph Mansfield’s revealing letter of 1920: “I love this place more and more. One is conscious of it as I used to be conscious of New Zealand . . . Why I don’t feel like this in England heaven knows. But my light goes out in England” (53). However, Kimber recognizes that Mansfield’s Francophilia was hardly exceptional for the times, citing T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf as other examples. Moreover, before she ever left home in Wellington, Mansfield had been reading French—Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant among others. So we have evidence of a mutual love affair between France and Mansfield; but that is hardly the whole story in that it fails to address the different reception of Mansfield and her work at home (all Colonials called England “Home”) and abroad (France). Kimber’s answer is that the French and English were looking at two quite different aspects of the writer—the focus in France was primarily on the life and in England it was upon the work. Yet, as she painstakingly demonstrates, it was not quite that simple. The French literary establishment seem to have responded all too eagerly to John Middleton Murry’s cloyingly sentimental “repackaging” of his wife after her early death in 1923 and thus “put Mansfield on a pedestal” and transformed her into something of a secular saint. In particular, she seems to have been adopted by a group of conservative, often Catholic, literati such as H. Daniel-Rops, Louis Gillet and Gabriel Marcel, some of them members of the Académie Française and some of them associated with Charles Maurras’s Action Française. The implausibility of this quasi-canonization of a woman whose short life was unconventional enough to cause her mother to cut her out of her will may now seem self-evident in light of the biographical work of Anthony Alpers, Jeffrey Meyers, and Claire Tomalin. The numerous love affairs, the bisexual experimentation, the ill-conceived marriage to a near stranger, [End Page 149] the unrecognized case of gonorrhea—this is hardly the profile of a saint. What Kimber does so well is show how Mansfield’s French admirers succeeded in obscuring the memory of the flesh-and-blood woman by substituting an almost unrecognizable simulacrum. They had access to the literary journals—especially to La nouvelle revue française (NRF) under the editorship of Jacques Rivière and to the notoriously conservative Revue des deux mondes—and they wrote many of the prefaces and produced many of the translations of her work. Murry, already a respected figure in English literary circles, was also particularly well positioned to control the image of his newly deceased wife. In The Nation and Athenaeum—Murry had edited one of its predecessors, the Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921—appeared an anonymous obituary a few days after Mansfield’s death on 9 January 1923 that Kimber is surely correct in attributing to Murry. With its extravagant references to her “spiritual excellence” and to “the sustaining power of a rare spirit” (185) it is clearly the fount and source of the later French representation of Mansfield. And Murry was not alone in his hyperbolic language. Kimber cites the novelist H. M. Tomlinson, author of All Our Yesterdays, who spoke of “her look of penetrating intelligence—of that divination which is supposed to belong to those not quite of this world” (185). Of course, like so many of her male...