Katherine's Will

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Journal of New Zealand Literature

Mansfield Collected"The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield" Volume One, 1903-1917 by KatherineMansfield; Vincent O'Sullivan; Margaret Scott; The Stories of Katherine Mansfield byKatherine Mansfield; Antony AlpersReview by: W. H. NewJournal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL, No. 3 (1985), pp. 61-70Published by: Journal of New Zealand Literature and hosted by the University of WaikatoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20455162 .Accessed: 28/12/2011 11:57

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MANSFIELD COLLECTEDA Review of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, eds VincentO'Sullivan and Margaret Scott, volume one, 1903-1917, (Oxford:Clarendon, 1984) and The Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. AntonyAlpers (Auckland:-OUP, 1984).

W H NewUniversity of British Columbia

On the 7th of August, 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote a letter to JohnMiddleton Murry that amounted to an informal will. 'All mymanuscripts I leave entirely to you to do with what you like', she wrote.'Go through them one day, dear love, and destroy all you do not use.Please destroy all letters you do not wish to keep and all papers. Youknow my love of tidiness. Have a clean sweep, Bogey, and leave allfair--will you?"1 It's been readers' reward and problem ever since thatMurry responded so literally to the first of these sentences and soidiosyncratically to the others. For forty years after her death, theMansfield of literary history and the Mansfield available for publicconsumption were both largely Murry's creation. He did not throw outthe manuscript fragments: we owe him that. He published some, gavesome away and sold others. Yet he clipped the letters Mansfield wroteto him so that in print they idealised (harsher persons said'sentimentalised') their marriage; he tailored her jottings into hisversion of a journal and a critical sketchbook; he edited--and sometimesaltered--her fictional prose. And as he fell gradually into literarydisfavour, so did she. From about 1940 to 1960, there was littlesustained critical interest in her work: she was interesting for her life,apparently, but not for her craft--or at least not for her craft in anydetail. Critics either lauded or dismissed her for having 'femininesensitivity'. Words like 'quivering' marched through critical commentaryas though they were aesthetically substantial. And Mansfield appearedto have found her niche: that of the talented colonial, who might haveaccomplished much had she only lived; the fringe-Bloomsbury,fringe-Garsington hanger-on, whose work was eclipsed by that of Joyce,Lawrence, Huxley, and Woolf; the writer of (tonal pause) 'short stories',who could never quite manage a novel. She was everyone's epilogue,and no-one's chapter.But in the last twenty-five years, there have been otherdiscoveries--of many of her manuscripts first of all: in the Preface tohis collection of Mansfield's fiction, Antony Alpers tells the story ofgaining access to the Newberry Library collection--and of data thatreshapes how we read and understand this remarkable writer. There wasAlpers' The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1980); John Carswell's Lifeand Letters (1978); Cherry Hankin's Freudian exploration of the fiction,Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (1983); Ian Gordon's


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edition of The Urewera Notebook (1980); Jean Stone's 1977 edition ofMansfield's early Australian stories; the Turnbull Library Record'spublication during the 1970's of various manuscript fictions; essays byVincent O'Sullivan (1975) and C.K. Stead (1977); and more besides.What the biography establishes is the extraordinary degree to whichMansfield touched the lives of so many major twentieth-century literaryfigures, and the degree to which she occupies a much more central placein the modification of twentieth-century fictional style than had beenadequately appreciated. The edited texts confirm the complexities ofher stylistic practice, and the new criticism has begun to address issuesof word choice and speech act as well as those of gesture andpersonality. There remained, however, no complete, accurate edition ofMansfield's writings themselves, and it was to fill this need that twosubstantial projects began in the 1970's. Under the editorial guidance ofVincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Mansfield's complete extantletters were to be collected, in four volumes; volume one, coveringthe period 1903-1917, is now in print. And Antony Alpers undertook tosift through all available editions and manuscripts, and to produce whathe has called a 'Definitive Edition' of The Stories of KatherineMansfield. Readers are indebted to both enterprises. The effortrequired just to read Mansfield's handwriting merits praise in itself. Butthere is also evidence of devotion here, and scholarly care, which makesthe accomplishment of these books, and the occasional disappointments,all the more striking.

The book of Collected Letters almost reads like one of Mansfield'sbroken, open narrative forms; it presents a series of internal dramas,sketches of character and characters, and incidents both stage-managedand circumstantial. What the collection particularly shows is the varietyof faces Mansfield had--or could assume--for the variety of hercorrespondents. Of the more than 300 letters in this volume, about athird are to Murry; over fifty come from the files of Bertrand Russelland Lady Ottoline Morrell, and nearly thirty are addressed to the Hon.Dorothy Brett and S. S.Koteliansky. Mansfield exuded at the friends ofher youth, Edie Bendall and Sylvia Payne; she wrote carefully to herparents, extravagantly to Garnet Trowell, formally to her typist,affectionately to Koteliansky, guardedly to Virginia Woolf, stiffly to herbanker, coolly to Bertrand Russell; and the letters to John MiddletonMurry constitute a kind of whole sub-genre inwhich affection (recordedin pet-names and manuscript drawings as well as in direct verbalstatements) and irritation (very clearly stated) are about equallycombined. There is an early note, dated 12 April 1912, which Mansfieldapparently left on the breakfast table for Murry shortly after he becameher boarder; it's the shortest and probably least important letter in thecollection, but in some ways as typical of the writer as any of thelonger, reflective letters are, and as cryptic. It reads: 'This is youregg. You must boil it.' Which leaves open to the reader the chance toguess--as perhaps it did for Murry that 1912 April morning--whether theemphasis is on the boil or the You. She was desperate for love, butquick to preserve her distance--and she was also quick to identify inothers what she saw as weakness or vulnerability, especially that whichwas created by a lack of knowledge or a failure of nerve. Perhaps inso doing she was analysing herself; she was not un-self-critical. But inthe context of the many faces here, the moments of consciousrevelation are kept largely under control.


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The Letters from 1903 to 1917 show a number of changes in thewriter's life; the volume opens with the attitudinising of a Queen'sCollege schoolgirl, and closes in December 1971 when she reports that aspot has been found on her lung. From the end of the beginning to thebeginning of the end: but this is just one volume out of four. Yet tocome were Mansfield's years of debilitating illness and her years ofmature creativity--her return to fiction after several years of technicalexperiment. What this volume shows is something of the background tothe kinds of experiment which were to give to her f iction itscharacteristic shape--not just the autobiographical experiences in passionand exile which were to feed her sense of subject, but also theoverriding passion for language which gave her the understanding of thepower of pacing and the impact of chosen words, carefully arranged.We see her here posturing as sophisticate and lover--then writingjauntily but meekly to E. J. Brady of the Native Companion, happy inhaving her first stories find a publisher. Those early stories--sketcheson the way to becoming something more--themselves show something ofthe writer's capacity for posturing; 'Study: The Death of a Rose' (her1908 Triad piece) most of all. We then see her writing to her motherand her sisters--and as the Urewera Notebook confirms about the lettersprinted here, she made deliberate compositions out of the letters shesent her mother, pruning them for effect, and paring from the draftversions some of her more forthright observations. These letters weresketches, too. We then see her as friend and as businesswoman, sharingher insights with Murry and Koteliansky, and drumming up support forRhythm by writing to Compton Mackenzie, Martin Secker, JohnDrinkwater, and Edward Garnett. She tells Murry in 1914 of herinterest in Theocritus, and then by 1915 a letter to Koteliansky actuallybreaks into Theocritus' technique: satiric story-making by means of thedramatic scene. She glimpsed life in Bloomsbury and at Garsington,wrote to Frieda Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, and Anne Estelle Rice,displayed her misdirected infatuation with Francis Carco, her talent forparody, and her gift for observing people in place. Day's Bay is a placein time, seen and remembered. Paris in time of war is a placeobserved, perceived. And in her letters is fiction-on-the-way. As theill-fated affair with Carco is later transformed into her portrait of thedistasteful Raoul Duquette, so does Paris in 1915 turn into 'SpringPictures'; Theocritus lies behind 'Two Tuppeny Ones, Please', and theearly sketches lead on directly to 'Ole Underwood', 'Old Tar', 'The WindBlows', and many more.And just as she was the perpetrator of parody, so was shesometimes the victim of literary rivalry. This volume includespostcards, informal letters, business correspondence, notes, wires(including a false telegram about her illness, sent to Murry from France,to help him get a travel permit during wartime), andletters-to-the-editor both inflamed and contrived. Mansfield seems tohave accepted South African-born Beatrice Hastings' shrill tutelagewhen she first arrived in London and obtained her entree to the New

. It was with Hastings that she wrote seven parodies of thecurrent literary moguls (Kennedy, Chesterton, Le Gallienne, Austin,Philpotts, Bennett, and Wells), and it was as a letter-to-the-editor, onMay 25, 1911, that these were published. But now there follows one ofthose paradoxes to which scholarly editions and individual editorial


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decision are always susceptible. All seven parodies are collected in theLetters; two only--those of Bennett and Wells, which Alpers attributesdirectly to Mansfield--turn up also in the Stories, where they function asindicators of Mansfield's talent at writing skits. On the other hand,Alpers does not pick up yet another 'letter-to-the-editor' whichO'Sullivan and Scott collect and which more properly belongs in hisvolume than in theirs. It appears in the New Age on 5 October 1911,and shows Mansfield's continuing experiment with sketch form.Headed 'Along the Gray's Inn Road', it is, as O'Sullivan and Scott pointout, more 'prose poem' than letter, and they add: 'KM's friendship with

Orage and Beatrice Hastings had considerably cooled..., and theappearance of the sketch in the correspondence columns may be read asa piece of editorial malice' (p. 109). Certainly Hastings, in memoir, wasless than kind, and less than accurate: she dismissed the later sketches(of 1917) as 'incredibly vulgar stuff' and affirmed that Mansfield, after

discovering that Carco had as much exposed her as she had him, had"'twittered" her way out of a world she had fouled wherever shewent'.2 Such words read more as venom than as judgement. Though

Mansfield could also be crisply devastating, her literary judgements werealways more aesthetically informed, whether she was inveighing againstLawrence (in her 'Journal') or dismissing in another New Age letter (25

August 1910) the claims of two Canadian writers to any literary meritwhatsover:Far be it from me to repudiate Mr [Grant] Allen's statementdeclaring his own novels rubbish, but....

If Elinor Glyn is the prophetic woman's voice crying out of thewilderness of Canadian literature, let her European sister novelistslift shekelled hands in prayer that the 'great gulf' may ever yawnmore widely.There is aesthetic cleverness here ('yawn' is surely deliberate) and

about the quality of Glyn's work Mansfield is undoubtedly correct.There is posturing, too, but it's somewhat transparent. Mansfield likedto profess to despise anything from the Americas, particularlypretension; perhaps it helped to secure for her a sense of a home in Artthat she could not ever quite find in place, or find among many of hercompanions of the European literary scene.

One of her 191-5 letters to Murry includes a revelatory aside thatindicates just such uncertainty: 'Why haven't I got a real "home"', she

writes, 'a real life--...Im not a girl--Im a woman. I want things.'What this letter also does is begin to reveal the meticulousness ofscholarship that has gone into the editing of this book. O'Sullivan andScott have collected items from twenty-two individuals and institutionsaround the world--from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the U.S.A., and

England--some of which have been previously published, some publishedbut difficult to find, some here for the first time, some here incorrected form. The 'corrections' meant going back to the originalhandwriting, contending with Mansfield's hasty orthography, hersometimes unsure spelling, and her inconsistency about dates. The 1915letter just referred to, for example, is one that is dated '23 March 1915'in C.K. Stead's Letters and Journals (1977), but here dated '?7 May1915'. Inevitably '?' appears a good deal in this edition. Despite careand good intentions, there are some holograph words that cannot bedeciphered, some dates of composition left uncertain. A 1908 letter


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from Huka Falls, which in the Urewera Notebook Ian Gordon transcribesas 'Dear Marie', indicating it to be addressed to Mansfield's sister, ishere transcribed as 'Dear Man' and presumed to be addressed to TomTrowell. Other differences are mainly of punctuation, like the missingapostrophes in the 1915 passage to Murry. Always, however, O'Sullivanand Scott provide explanations of what they have done. They givecogent annotations to allusions in the letters; they establish fully whothe recipients of the letters are; and they set all the letters clearlyinto a running biographical context. There is more than biographicalinterest in them, of course--they illuminate texts and times as well asperson--and they are often absorbing to read in themselves. But theywill serve most to better our critical understanding of Mansfield's workand world, and they will do so because the editing here has been soadmirably accomplished.The editorial practice of Antony Alpers, in The Stories of KatherineMansfield--if not altogether different in kind from that of O'Sullivan andScott (in both books the aim is to produce a definitive text)--is certainlydifferent in character. By this Imean not only that the physical formatof the book is different--in the Letters, the annotations are attached tothe letters in question, whereas in the Stories they come as a coda tothe stories themselves--but also that Alpers' annotations are morepersonal, more subjective, a fact which shapes the editorial decisionsabout textual authority as well. Admittedly Alpers faces a problem withthe story texts, and his first editorial impulse is bibliographically sound:when possible, he takes as the authoritative text the last publishedversion (in book or periodical) which Mansfield is known to haveapproved. But almost at once there are problems: for many of thestories or story fragments appeared posthumously, under Murry'seditorial eye, not Mansfield's. In these cases--wisely again, at least inprinciple, and with extraordinary care--Alpers has gone back to themanuscripts, and accepted the Mansfield manuscript rather than theMurry edition as definitive. But not all the manuscripts are extant. Inthese cases Alpers has had to rely on the extant version, whichsometimes means Murry's. In the case of Prelude, he acknowledges thatVirginia Woolf edited it for its Hogarth Press publication. In anothercase ('Je ne parle pas francais') he accepts the first publication (HeronPress) rather than the bowdlerised version which Michael Sadleir insistedon for publication in Bliss and Other Stories, and he is correct in doingso--not just because it is a better version, but also because he hasMansfield's authority for his action: in the spring of 1920 shesurrendered to Murry's and Sadleir's pressure to cut into the story, butby December, after the story appeared, she reflects 'Iwas wrong' (p.561). But in another case still ('At the Bay'), Alpers introduces aneditorial emendation of his own (changing 'telegraph poles' to 'telegraph

wires', insisting that the original was a slip of the pen). Now he may beright (though it is possible to read the original phrase as a vivid, closedescription of either a wet pole or its even wetter reflection); myconcern, however, is with consistency. Why is it 'definitive' for Alpersto turn 'poles' into 'wires' and not 'definitive' to allow Murry to havemade (perhaps proper) editorial emendations? For example, Alperschanges the title of 'The Luft Bad' to 'The Luftbad' to make theGerman right, but changes 'Pension Seguin' back to 'Epilogue I:Pension Seguin', removing the accent aigu because it was Murry's


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editorial addition. I have no quarrel with reinstating 'Epilogue I'.Unfortunately removing the accent from Seguin makes the namenon-standard French; Murry was right. ('Seguin'--with no accent--existsin Daudet's 1866 Lettres de mon Moulin, but appears to be inventedthere; it is not in the standard dictionary of French surnames.)Similarly, while going back to the Heron Press version of 'Je ne parlepas franpais' allows Alpers to reinstate the several sexual declarationsthat emphasise the corruption of Raoul Duquette's character, it alsoproduces a version of Duquette saying 'passons oultre' instead of'passons outre'--which is either a slip in the original spelling, or a slip inthe original typesetting, or a deliberate but unorthodox archaism. Butthere is no editorial note to indicate. The closer one reads this'definitive edition' of the stories, the more one encounters suchdiscretionary moments in the editing. Much of what is here is

wonderful; and yet one day the whole book is going to have to be doneall over again. That's disappointing.But first let us acknowledge the riches that are here. At her death,Mansfield left about 93 complete stories (the 'about' depends on whetherone counts as 'stories' the juvenilia, the various sketches and 'prosepoems' she wrote, or the eleven 'dialogues') and about three dozenfragments. (Alpers notes that the Newberry Library holds about onehundred manuscripts and the Turnbull Library many more, including someforty-six notebooks and hundreds of loose sheets.) Collected by Alpersare some eighty-f ive pieces only (one is the set of twoletters-to-the-editor parodies), and as he includes some of thefragments, what this means is that this 'definitive' edition leaves outrather a lot. Ian Gordon's Undiscovered Country (1974) includes more ofthe fragments than this collection does, and the reader who wants toread all of Mansfield's fiction must still consult Gordon, the TurnbullLibrary Record, Jean Stone's Australian Collection, The Aloe, and theCollected Letters. Alpers notes that to include everything would havemeant an unwieldy or a second volume (perhaps this was a publisher'scaveat), but if the Letters merited four volumes, surely a CollectedStories could have merited two. The subsidiary issue is that of choice,which as with any anthology (and this edition must now be called that)reflects individual editorial choice and will never satisfy everyone.What the choices here indicate is that the ultimate aim of thiscollection is to reach the general reader rather than the scholar, anaudience for whom the notes and the format of the book are alsodesigned; the problem is that the scholarship in the book leads one tobelieve that the book satisfies scholarly needs as well, and it doesn't.It is a pleasure, that is, to find collected here four items ofjuvenilia, including 'Enna Blake' (written when Mansfield was nine) and'About Pat' (an interesting antecedent to 'Prelude'). I also appreciatefinding 'A Pic-nic', collected here for the first time, from the New Agein 1917, and 'The Festival of the Coronation, with apologies toTheocritus', Mansfield's 1911 experiment with dramatic pastiche, atechnique the author was substantially to develop over the next tenyears. Also here are 'The Education of Audrey', 'Green Goggles', and'The Lost Battle' fragment from Geneva. But consider what is left out,for reasons of length, form, or alleged sentimentality: 'Juliet', four ofthe five Native Companion and Triad contributions, 'Mary', 'A FairyStory', 'A Marriage of Passion', 'Tales of a Courtyard', 'New Dresses',


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'The House', 'Old Tar', 'Brave Love', 'Autumn I', The Aloe, 'TheCommon Round', 'To the Last Moment', 'A Suburban Fairy Tale','See-Saw', 'This Flower' (the manuscript title, Alpers notes, is 'LateSpring'), 'The Wrong House', 'Hat with a Feather', 'Widowed', 'Daphne',and 'A Cup of Tea'. The quality of these stories varies a lot. But thenso does the quality of the works that are collected. If the issue iscompleteness, then quality isn't a criterion, but if quality is thecriterion, then we're faced with interpreting the version of Mansfieldthat this collection projects. That's quite another matter.The Alpers version starts to come clear when we look at thereasons adduced for omitting some stories and the tenor of thecommentary on others. 'A Cup of Tea' appears to be dropped becauseof the company it kept when it first appeared in 1922--in a pulpmagazine called Story-teller, which published Ethel M. Dell and E. PhillipsOppenheim. Yet Mansf ield is better than either of these writers--herstyle shows it--and 'A Cup of Tea' is a striking late example of herfascination with the way casual observations upset people's entiresystems of presumed moral absolutes. Mansfield's stories do commenton each other, as Alpers repeatedly points out. 'The Common Round',however, is omitted because Alpers chooses to include the later versionof the same event, 'Pictures'. Yet this was an opportunity todemonstrate how Mansfield revised one form (in this case the dramaticdialogue) into another (in this case narrative). As for the NativeCompanion vignettes: 'since they were in no sense stories they are notincluded here' (p. 545). Yet here was the opportunity to explore theways in which Mansfield drew on the forms of sketch and vignette asmuch as on Theocritus and his mimes. They show Mansfield at work onstyle, on the shaping of cadence and the effects of word choice andjuxtaposition. But the sketch eludes Alpers' critical grasp. He hasmuch to say about Theocritus--and even devises a wonderful phrase todescribe Mansfield's later monodramas: 'dialogue-for-one' (p. 557)--butwhen it comes to dealing with the reappearance of the sketch inMansfield's later work, he either dismisses it ('Along the Gray's InnRoad'), or pursues a desperate quest for a legitimising 'source'somewhere (hence Baudelaire becomes his 'ancestor' [p. 554] for 'SpringPictures'), or gets it simply wrong. ('See-Saw' is certainly not, as thecommentary tells us, 'a sketch of children playing on Hampstead Heath'[p. 562]; it is a fantasy about real and mimic behaviour, about languagethat is empty of meaning, and communication that does not requirewords.) And while he acknowledges Mansfield's quest for formalinnovation, he does little with that fact except as regards dialogue; hefinds the term 'Epilogue' to be one that 'rather wantonly' (p. 553)describes 'Pension Seguin' and 'Violet', for example, but does not reachto see the parallel with 'Prelude'. As the letters indicate, such terms as'epilogue' and 'prelude' describe for Mansfield the dimensions ofpsychological insight. In the end, it seems, it is not the author's pursuitof literary form that matters to Alpers, it is the rootedness of thestories in biographical and historical event. Curiously, this stancerequires the stories to be far more documentary than the textsthemselves really suggest, which results in yet another set of disquietingdisparities in this edition.There is no question about the quality of the biographical detail;Alpers knows the life and the period minutely, a fact which often results


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in some sensitive and valuable commentary. The note on 'Germans atMeat' comments informatively on the story's allusion to a 1909 WestEnd play, an anti-German melodrama called An Englishman's Home(though, naming the play's author's brother, the note does manage toavoid naming the author himself). Comments on the Elizabeth Bibescoaffair, in connection with 'Poison', and on the Carco affair and chlorinegas, in connection with 'An Indiscreet Journey' and 'Je ne parle pasfrancais', are equally valuable. So, too, are the comments on 'TheDaughters of the Late Colonel' and 'A Pic-nic', among others. Butwhile references to Sylvia Payne and Ida Baker abound, they do notalways seem to the point. And does it help interpret her story to hearthat 'Ma Parker...is based on K. M's favourite charwoman in London,Mrs Bates' (p. 568)? Or that 'Brechenmacher' was the name of a realBavarian postman--especially when the note on 'Frau BrechenmacherAttends a Wedding' fails to acknowledge any of the feministreverberations of the name meaning 'break-maker'. Unfortunately thedocumentary impulse sometimes starts to interfere with the scholarship(taking the space to say, of 'Ole Underwood', that 'the setting isauthentic windy Wellington' is altogether wasteful; it is too breezy aremark to be instructive); and at other times preciseness is utterlyabandoned. What do we make of remarks like these: about 'Something

Childish But Very Na-tural', that 'several years later she could probablyhave published it if she had wished to' (p. 554)? or about 'How PearlButton was Kidnapped', that 'the "actual" setting may have been QueenCharlotte Sound' (p. 552)? or about the New Age letters-to-the-editorMansfield wrote with Beatrice Hastings, that 'the parody of Wells...isprobably also hers. If it isn't, it ought to be' (p. 550). This is whimsy.But it confirms presumptions about the intended reader being generaland casual rather than someone interested in the particularities of text.Such generalisation extends to the editorial and interpretiveannotations as well. The consistency is off. Alpers usefully annotates'fly biscuits' ('The Woman at the Store'), and perhaps less necessarilyexplains the meaning of whare and 'station' (likening the latter to anAmerican ranch); yet he does not annotate terms and allusions muchless familiar to the modern reader--'venetian' in 'Millie', for example(blind or carpet?), or 'Katharine Tynan' in 'Epilogue II: Violet'. Sensiblyhe restores to 'Carnation' its bit of New Zealand idiom ('shout us an icecream', which Murry had altered to 'give us'),and valuably he restoresthe opening participle, with all its indicative force, to the title of 'Beinga Truthful Adventure'. But the dedication to Anne Estelle Rice, whichprefaced 'Ole Underwood', here disappears (was itMurry's?).Alpers turns the character 'Jim' in 'The Woman at the Store' into'Hin', that being what the manuscript reads (Imust interpolate here thatI have not had access to any of the manuscripts to cross-check any ofthe manuscript readings); on other occasions he relies on guesswork,changing 'Snipold's' in 'At Lehmann's' into 'Luitpold'sL-'as being probablywhat was written' (p. 548). On even more occasions, however, the

comments on textual variants are so vague as to be functionless, andone is reduced to collating for oneself, all over again. In a note on theomitted 'New Dresses', for example, Alpers says that Murry changed thecharacters' German name to Carsfield but does not mention what the

German originals were; one has to go back to Rhythm's October 1912issue to find out. And consider this comment on 'Daughters of the Late


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Colonel': 'after appearing in the London Mercury, the story wasincluded, with one pedantic editorial correction here revoked, in TheGarden Party...' (p. 568). It's perhaps pedantic to want to know whatthat is, but the notes say no more. About Reginald Peacock, we aretold that Mansfield 'seems to have momentarily confused him withStanley Burnell' (p. 558), but not specifically how (the Stanley of'Prelude' goes through an identically phrased exercise routine). About'The Man Without a Temperament' we are told that it is printed 'withsome errors here corrected' (p. 563), but not what they are--a quickcheck indicates 'veranda' respelled as 'verandah' (Mansfield's standardusage throughout), but what else? The book doesn't say.Clearly there are rather a lot of textual changes, some moreconsequential than others. All are important if this text is to servesubsequent scholarship. Issues of name and title stand obviously in thecentre of things. Idiom can make or break a nuance. And thoughsimple spelling may be less significant (the difference between 'veranda'

and 'verandah' is less indicative than the fact that one stands on averanda inmany parts of the world, and also under one in New Zealand,as Ian Gordon pointed out in 19843), punctuation is a matter of greatconsequence when a writer depends as firmly as Mansfield does on thetempo of the prose. Readers familiar with the Constable/Penguinedition of In a German Pension will also find that paragraphing issubstantially altered here, which does not change the sequence ofevents, but does have some impact on the shaping of associations. WhatI am saying, then, is that these versions of the stories do frequentlydiffer from those we have come to regard as the accepted standard.And for the most part they deserve to become the new standardMansfield texts; there is evidence here of editorial patience anddeliberation. But that 'for the most part' has to be every scholarlyreader's defensive shield. There are problems that this edition createseven while it attempts to resolve others. Let me be plainer still: TheStories of Katherine Mansfield is a good book, long overdue. I wouldperhaps have praised more and complained less had it been content tocall itself a selection. But by its subtitle, it claims to be 'Definitive'.'Definitive' is one thing it is not.


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Notes1. Quoted in Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (London:ICape, 1980), p. 365.2. Life, pp. 397-98.3. 'Photographic Recall', N Z Listener, 10 March 1984, p. 70.

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