Book Review: All Sorts of lives

Mitchell Alcrim reviews Claire Harman, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (Chatto & Windus, 2023)

By the time of her tragically early death from tuberculosis at the age of 34, Katherine Mansfield had written over 100 short stories and had published three collections. (2) Claire Harman takes an unconventional approach to life-writing in her book All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Taking ‘a fresh look at [Mansfield’s] life and achievements, side by side, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story’, (2) Harman selects ten stories, some famous, some less so, ‘all representing aspects of her evolution and achievement’ and ‘read[s] them in connection with her life … How do they work? Where do they come from? And what was she striving for?’ (11) In ten chapters, each bearing the title of the story in question, Harman’s book artfully blends key biographical details and incisive literary analysis. This strikes me as the ideal method for writing about Mansfield, an author whose work was of such vital importance to her.

Mansfield described this ‘driving necessity’ to write in her journal of 1919:

Shall I be able to express, one day, my love of work – my desire to be a better writer, my longing to take greater pains. And the passion I feel. It takes the place of religion – it is my religion – of people – I create my people – of ‘life’ – it is Life. (2)

Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in New Zealand in 1888 to a prominent ‘bourgeois clan’ (21) but residing in England for most of her adult life, Mansfield felt like an outsider from the start. Too ‘English’ for New Zealand, and yet too ‘savage’ for England, she was ‘the eternal outsider.’ (20) In 1919 she wrote:

I am the little colonial walking in the London garden patch  – allowed to look, perhaps, but not to linger … a stranger – an alien … nothing but a little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills & dreaming. (20-21)

Harman argues that Mansfield came to relish this outsider status and ‘gravitated naturally towards the most marginalized fictional form.’ The short story provided her with a kind of artistic freedom. Not as highly regarded as novels or poetry, the short story found her ‘[w]orking entirely on her own …’ (3) It was a form rife with possibility for experimentation and innovation.

Perhaps in part due to this feeling of ‘otherness,’ Mansfield was keenly attuned to the notion that the self ‘was not only multiple, but endlessly shifting.’ (191) The challenge to be true to herself and to her vision was constantly on her mind:

True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well, really, that’s what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections – there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests. (11)

Mansfield, in fact, employed a wide ‘range of pseudonyms and alter egos … both in her correspondence and in the fictions she was writing … Fluidity was all.’ (27) ‘I am child, woman, and more than half man,’ she wrote in her journal. (29) And in ‘Prelude’, one of her best-known stories, Mansfield  dramatises the concept of the shifting self. Beryl, the young aunt, enraged, thinks:

How despicable! Despicable! … ‘It’s marvelous how you keep it up,’ she said to the false self.  But then it was only because she was so miserable – so miserable.  If she had been happy and leading her own life, her false life would cease to be. She saw the real Beryl – a shadow … a shadow. Faint and insubstantial she shone. What was there of her except the radiance? And for what tiny moments she was really she. Beryl could almost remember every one of them. And those times she had felt: ‘Life is rich and mysterious and good, and I am rich and mysterious and good, too.’ Shall I ever be that Beryl for ever? Shall I? How can I? (186)

But, as Harman indicates, ‘then there is an interruption, and next minute Beryl is thinking about her crumpled skirt. One knows that her inability to access her “real self” for more than seconds at a time will continue for the whole of life – as it does for all of us.’ (186)

‘Prelude’ is a remarkable story. As Harman points out, it is both the longest story she ever published and the most ‘ambitiously experimental.’ In twelve vignettes, it recounts the Burnell family’s move to a large suburban house and their thoughts and feelings while settling into their new home. These ‘interconnected scenes’ are all given equal importance, and ‘the picture of a whole small community of loves and longings builds up without any forced narrative linking.’ (182) The reader is given the impression of ‘watching the Burnells rather than reading about them.’ (183) Mansfield does not judge her characters: there are no morals taught, no lessons learned. This method echoes Chekhov’s views on artistic distance: ‘An artist must not be a judge of his people or of what they say, but only an impartial witness’. But, as Harman points out, Mansfield had already adopted this stance before she had even read this now-famous dictum. (217) It is this unobtrusiveness and lack of closure which give ‘Prelude’ and many of Mansfield’s stories their special power – they are frequently as inconclusive as life itself.

‘Prelude’ draws on the Beauchamp family’s move which occurred when Mansfield was five years old. It is a reworking of ‘The Aloe,’ a work begun in spring 1915 and planned as her first novel. Tragedy struck in October of that year when Mansfield’s favourite sibling, her beloved younger brother, Leslie, known in the family as ‘Chummie’, died suddenly while testing a hand grenade, mere days after being sent to the Front. (126) This devastating loss led to an artistic reckoning. Early in 1916 she asked herself: ‘Now really, what is it, that I do want to write?’ and concluded that ‘[n]ow – now I want to write recollections of my own country.’ (128-29) Her aim was clear:

I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world. It must be mysterious, as though floating – it must take the breath … I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry basket squeaked at ‘75’ – but all must be told with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an after glow, because, you, my little sun of it, are set. (129)

Harman writes that the stories ‘she wrote in this mode – ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’, [and] ‘The Garden Party’ – are her very best, full of sights, sounds, objects and scents so vividly recalled that they have a solidity and substance quite apart from the story, and seem to exist on their own.’ (5) A ‘totally new kind of controlled, artful recreation,’ (128) they are ‘a way of resuscitating her memories of [Chummie]’ and their shared childhood in New Zealand. (5)

Though many of her stories may be autobiographical in origin, Mansfield had a strong belief in the clear division between autobiography and creative writing. Mere autobiography could never truly be art. ‘I think there is a very profound distinction between any kind of confession and creative work – not that that rules out the first by any means,’ she wrote in a letter to Hugh Walpole in 1920. (96) So, for example, although ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel,’ may have been in part inspired by her fraught relationship with her overly devoted friend, Ida Baker, it becomes an exploration of, or a ‘looking into’, the lives of all the ‘hampered women of her generation.’ (96) Mansfield has the ability to see round ‘the material in her own life in order to give herself more artistic freedom’. (104) Mansfield took a firm position on these ‘acts of writerly sharing’:

I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw on one’s real familiar life – to find the treasure in that … And the curious thing is that if we describe this which seems to us so intensely personal, other people take it to themselves and understand it as if it were their own. (192)

Mansfield was influenced by the writers she loved, and, as Harman notes, ‘influence was not something she ever thought of denying.’ (71) ‘[W]e all, as writers, to a certain extent, absorb each other when we love’, she wrote to a young writer who had asked her to have a look at some of his stories. (70) The work of writers such as Chekhov, Wilde, and Shakespeare were ‘essential nourishment … my daily bread … the more one lives with them the better it is for ones work.’  (226) The key was to accept ‘the gift’, make it one’s own and create a ‘wider vision’. (70-71) Mansfield believed that it was the duty of a writer to be constantly building on the work and traditions of the past – always moving forward and going further:

Not necessarily to grow the sheep, comb the wool, colour and brand it – but joyfully take all that is ready, and with that saved time, go a great way further. (71)

Mansfield and Woolf

Mansfield’s friendship with Virginia Woolf provides one of the most fascinating elements of Harman’s book. Though temperamentally unsuited to one another, the two women were brought together by ‘the thing that meant most to both of them: writing’. (196) Having chosen ‘Prelude’ as the second publication of the newly-established Hogarth Press, Woolf was initially uncertain about Mansfield’s talent but soon found herself visiting her and enjoying ‘enkindling’ conversation, finding with Katherine ‘a sense of ease & interest … due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art.’ Mansfield, for her part, recognised that they were both ‘after so very nearly the same thing’. (198) Which is perhaps why she was so disappointed with Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day, which appeared in 1919; Mansfield found it musty and old-fashioned in both form and content.

Reviewing it for the Athenaeum, she said: ‘if the novel dies, it will to be to give way to some new form of expression; if it lives, it must accept the fact of a new world’. (198-199) To Mansfield, who had suffered such a profound loss during the Great War, Woolf’s novel, written ‘as if the war hadn’t happened’ must have seemed almost an affront. ‘The novel cant just leave the war out … we have to take it into account and find new expressions new moulds for our new thoughts & feelings.’ (199) While Harman’s suggestion that Mansfield and her criticism of Night and Day had a direct influence on Woolf’s ‘change of course’ may be a stretch, nevertheless the rivalry between the two writers was a boon to both and provided necessary encouragement to go ever further in their work. Upon hearing of Mansfield’s death, Woolf wrote in her diary on 16 January 1923: ‘When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine’s my rival no longer’ and in later years confessed that ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of … Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else.’ (255)

John Middleton Murry

Mansfield’s relationship with the writer, John Middleton Murry, begun in 1911 and lasting until her death, was one of the longest of her life. Collaborating on Rhythm, the avant-garde periodical edited by Murry, they soon became lovers and eventually married. Harman describes how romantic attraction soon gave way to an intellectual partnership which was a mainstay of both their lives. According to Harman, Murry was ‘not a passionate nor confident man’, (78) admitted to being ‘afraid of sex’ (142) and was never the ideal object for Mansfield’s longings. As early as 1915 she had misgivings and wrote to Murry asking: ‘Do I love you so much more than you love me or do you too – feel like this?’ (141) Mansfield and Murry found a different way of being together and forged ‘a relationship that became less and less to do with being lovers and more with a shared, perhaps rather desperate, conviction that “there was, somewhere to be found, a better way of life” and that “if only we could keep together, we should discover it.”’ (142) Interestingly, it is Murry we must thank for making so much of Mansfield’s work available to us. In her will, she had instructed him ‘to publish as little as possible and to tear up and burn as much as possible’. (255) Referring particularly to Mansfield’s notebooks, quoted throughout this biography, Harman writes:

The irony is that without Murry’s flouting of her wishes, this key aspect of her writing, and of her personality, would not have survived, showing her both at her most vulnerable and most strong … (9)

Illness was a constant presence in Katherine Mansfield’s life, particularly following the diagnosis of tuberculosis in 1918. In February of that year, she expressed her deepest fear about dying: ‘How unbearable it would be to die, leave “scraps”, “bits”, nothing real finished.’ (174) Even in the face of death, it was her writing that mattered most. Long periods of being unable to work followed. How remarkable it is then that she managed to produce some of her most successful work during the last few years of her life, even publishing another ravishing collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, early in 1922, less than one year before her death.

Mansfield’s unique spirit shines brightly throughout Harman’s book. Isolated and often alone during bouts of illness, she wrote to her brother-in-law, Richard Murry, ‘Is it right to resist such suffering?’ (233) As Harman puts it: ‘What sets Mansfield apart from most people and most temperaments is that she saw suffering as a “privilege” and dying an experience unlike any other.’ (233) And, indeed, in her private notebooks, she wrote:

One must submit. Do not resist. Take it. Be overwhelmed. Accept it fully – make it part of Life. Everything in Life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. (9)

Harman writes that ‘Mansfield felt the impulse to celebrate beauty and vitality more and more urgently as her health deteriorated.’ (136-137) An appreciation of beauty and a desire to share it are found throughout her work. For example, in Bliss, Bertha Young and her guest Miss Fulton stare at the luminous pear tree in the garden, a potent symbol of enduring beauty:

How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands? (134)

Claire Harman’s All Sorts of Lives is an engaging and lively new form of literary biography. Looking at Katherine Mansfield’s work in close connection with her life, Harman offers new perspectives but is never dogmatic in her readings. Much like Mansfield herself, she asks questions rather than offering facile answers and, along the way, suggests new ways of thinking about Mansfield’s life and art. She inspires us to return to Mansfield’s work and to the many pleasures to be discovered there. It’s a wonderful tribute to a writer who once proclaimed:

I mean to make Life wonderful if I can … that’s what writing means to me – to enrich – to give. (12)

Mitchell Alcrim, Cambridge, Mass. 

Join us to study the wonderful writings of Katherine Mansfield in a live online course, Katherine Mansfield: Stories of Life and Death, 14 May-18 June 2025.