Mansfield, Woolf and Music: ‘The queerest sense of echo’

Abstract

Both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf repeatedly invoke music as a metaphor for writing. More than just a descriptive mechanism, music serves them as an explicit model for the development of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques. This article explores the importance of the idea of music to the literary projects of Mansfield and Woolf. After comparing Mansfield's extensive training in classical music with Woolf's assumed position as a ‘common listener’, it traces the deployment of musical analogies in their respective discussions of their own compositional processes as well as of modern fiction more generally. Finally it analyses a pair of short stories composed during the period of greatest interchange between the rival writers: in Mansfield's ‘The Singing Lesson’ and Woolf's ‘The String Quartet’, music is the catalyst for new representations of interiority and a key influence on the narrative practices of both writers.