Reviews for The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 21

The average rating for The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 21 based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-05-18 00:00:00 Jacqueline Campbell I'm a fanatic about notebooks, generally my own. I've always had notebooks, and they've taken on different forms and served different purposes throughout my life. I rarely look back at what I've written, and I'm not even sure where some of my notebooks are. They're packed, they're not in one box, they're spread out, and I keep moving them. They move with me because they are me. I'm also fucking territorial about my notebooks. I might not know where they all are, but I know they're there somewhere, and don't you even think about touching them. It's not so much that they're filled with secrets, but they are so important to me that I can't bear the thought of someone touching them and then - I dunno - stumbling into an open fire. I wouldn't care so much about you, but I'd scream bloody murder if you took my notebook into the flames with you. I also respect the privacy of others, so if you're also a consummate notebookeer, I'll respect that. I won't snoop in your pages, I won't touch it, I won't even look at it. I certainly won't take it near any open flames. I've known too many people who have had their notebooks taken, or viewed without permission (it's happened to me a time or two as well), and the feeling that it creates is unnerving. It creates a sense of vulnerability, a loss, an overall ickiness. I'm not talking about public blogs - if you want your stuff on the Interwebz for the world to see, you go right ahead. My notebooks serve a different purpose, and it is most certainly not public. So I'm of two minds about these sorts of collections that have been published over the years - on the one hand here's a chance to look into the minds of some of the world's best artists, writers, musicians, politicians, etc., to get an idea about what made them tick, what drove them, their passions, their beliefs, their deepest thoughts. On the other hand I feel dirty because not many people during their life who keep these sorts of notebooks expect them ever to see the light of day. Many of these people have asked loved ones to burn their manuscripts upon their demise, including these journals and notebooks and letters. Many of these people then die and their loved ones rake in the big bucks by selling all these things they had just promised to protect. Ew, right? I'd come back as a ghost and cut a bitch if that happened to me. But I am human, and I am curious. And here was a collection of writing by New Zealand's Katherine Mansfield for me to peruse. I'm sorry, I paid for this collection, and I enjoyed every bit of it. Katherine Mansfield is best known for her short stories such as The Garden Party and Other Stories. When she died of tuberculosis at 34, her husband edited her journals before publishing them for public consumption. He took out things that he didn't think were important or that he didn't feel were appropriate to share with the world. In other words, he totally butchered what she had written. Now in this collection edited by Mansfield scholar Margaret Scott - she has put all the pieces back together and has published the whole shebang. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Mansfield wrote about the mundane, the everyday occurrences, her unhappiness in New Zealand; she made notes for stories, griped about her writing (or lack thereof at times), made a list of accounts, wrote recipes and poetry side-by-side. She was a real person, y'know? That's the sort of thing that we (the pedestrian readers) tend to forget about musicians, artists, writers, etc. - that they are or were real people, that underneath the celebrity they were regular folk, not all that different from said pedestrian reader. I found myself relating to Mansfield on levels that I hadn't expected to when I picked this collection up. I'm sitting here in 2012, about to turn 34 in a couple of months, and I can relate to Mansfield. I don't have tuberculosis, and I don't know what it feels like to suffer with that; but I get it. She helps me get it just by the time and effort she put into her journals. These are things I can't get just by reading her short stories or other previously published writing. So today I'm feeling pretty okay about reading an entire collection of her deepest, most secret thoughts. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel awful and will never forgive myself. But overall what happened is I want to read everything Mansfield wrote, I want to re-read the short stories I've already read, just to see if my opinion of them (or my understanding) will have changed after reading her notebooks. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some of my own scribbling to do.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-26 00:00:00 Seth Graham This is a heavy tome in many ways. For years I re-read and treasured a totally pirated edition of Journal of Katherine Mansfield, which I had re-bound last year (and the stinky printer removed the original cover, against my specific instructions to bind it in as part of the book! Not only that, they threw it away!!) A few years ago (or perhaps many, I forget) I bought this complete edition, along with some of Mansfield's stories. It weighs about 3 pounds, and that's in paperback. Mansfield had a habit of going through her letters and papers and burning them periodically--which at the rate she moved around England and France is hardly surprising. How glad I am that she didn't actually destroy quite all of the "huge complaining diaries" that she felt took so much time away from her real work as an author. Because to be honest, I prefer her journals--but then I am a snoop by nature. I'd never read your personal notebook without permission, but I do like to read collections of letters and diaries. Mansfield's are masterly depictions of a mood, a scene, a moment, all that "external life" that she loved so much--but a great deal of her internal life as well. The facsimiles of some pages show the enormous task the editor set herself. Mansfield's writing was by her own admission impossibly bad. Was it a way to enforce secrecy? It may have been. OTOH, it may simply be that writing with a nib and ink makes scribblers of busy people. It certainly would me, and I have nothing like her excuse. The editor manages to clarify some obscure passages, and some that J. M. Murray bowdlerised; I refuse to accept that he could misinterpret her handwriting to that degree, given the content of some of the changed texts. He either wanted to protect his own ego or Mansfield's "image."