Katherine Mansfield was a writer who had a lot of feelings and had a lot of love to give.
To celebrate the anniversary of her birthday (14 October, 1888) this week, the Katherine Mansfield House & Garden has published a book collection of her love letters of all sorts.
Woman in Love’s foreword is by British filmmaker Richard Curtis of Love Actually fame, and his daughter Scarlett.
Katherine Mansfield. Photo: Ann Ronan Picture Library / Photo12 via AFP
Editor of the collection Nicola Saker, who is president of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace, says they cast the net wide to cover all love letters, to family, friends, mentors, and lovers.
Mansfield was a person who felt intensely and expressed it, Saker says.
"Some people she wrote to are now extraordinarily famous, people like Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Bertrand Russell, who weren't really that famous when she was writing to them. They were just part of her circle in London."
Photo: Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
There are photos of each of the correspondents in the book with a brief introduction to understand their connection to Mansfield.
One standout letter was to Princess Bibesco - the daughter of a former British prime minister - who was married but had literary aspirations and started an affair with Mansfield's second husband, who was an editor.
"She [Mansfield] got wind of the affair and she wrote to her and it goes like this:
Dear Princess Bibesco, I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world. You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation. Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield
"You can imagine the letter hissing as it came out of the envelope," Saker says.
Readers also get a peek at the emotional trajectory in Mansfield's life through the collection of letters, she says.
"There's a lot of letters to twin brothers with whom she was passionate about one and he wasn't interested in her. These were the sons of her cello teacher in Wellington.
"She wrote screeds of letters to both of them. She was 15 and they're kind of agonisingly painful and adolescent and pretentious but also extraordinarily vulnerable in a way Mansfield very quickly stopped being vulnerable, and those letters are kind of interesting for that reason in a way.
"She's so open to Garnet Trowell in particular, with whom she had got pregnant to and the child miscarried."
There's an academic view that some of her best writing was in her letters, which were incredibly honest, she says.
"Sometimes you can become aware of them being like a first draft of a passage about something that later appears in a story, so she was crafting them as well as talking to the correspondent. She was using them as writing exercises sometimes, I think."
Similar to her writing of short stories, there was a sense of immediacy in her letters, she says.
"Her work has that immediacy of just dropping you straight into a situation right away and that was why she appears so modern really I think."
There are also letters to her second husband - John Middleton Murry - included in the collection.
"That's 700 pages, I mean in 6 months alone she wrote over 120,000 words to him, we're talking about this incredible output, you had mail in London twice a day then."
Saker says they had been looking for a person with a New Zealand connection and fondness of English literature about love to write the foreword to the collection.
"I'd checked out years ago Richard Curtis because I admired his work so much, and checking it out involved Wikipedia basically and there it was 'born in Wellington' ... It's always just stayed with me."
Through mutual friends, Saker was able to send an email to him.
"So, I wrote an email and got the most wonderful email back from Richard Curtis, saying yes he'd love to but also suggesting he co-write it with his daughter Scarlett, who did a thesis on Mansfield in NYU."
All proceeds from the book will go towards the Katherine Mansfield House & Garden and its operation.
