Katherine Mansfield

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Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield , birth name Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (born October 14, 1888 in Wellington New Zealand , †  January 9, 1923 in Fontainebleau , Île-de-France ) was a New Zealand - British writer who died of tuberculosis at the age of 34 . In addition to usually short stories, she left numerous letters and notes. The response to her rather narrow work was and is strikingly broad.

Life

The birthplace in Wellington

The daughter of a banker spent her early childhood in the small town of Karori, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand, where she attended Wellington Girls' High School and contributed to the local school newspaper. When Kathleen was 11, her parents moved to town. In 1903 she left New Zealand to attend Queen's College in London for three years , which Charles Kingsley had founded specifically for the education and upbringing of women. After returning to New Zealand for two years, Mansfield spent the rest of her life in Europe from 1908, studying music and literature with financial support from her father. She was particularly interested in the French and German languages, wrote her first texts and made friends with DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf in the London literary scene . During this time she became pregnant by Garnet Trowell, a family friend from New Zealand. A marriage attempt with her considerably older singing teacher George Bowden failed on their wedding night - she left him. In the same year 1909, on the advice of her mother, she traveled to Bad Wörishofen , where the German-speaking Katherine Mansfield was to live comfortably but unnoticed and where she was supposed to give birth just as unobtrusively. When she tried to heave her suitcase onto a cupboard, however, she suffered a miscarriage.

Back in England, Mansfield caught the attention of various publishing houses. In connection with her first book publication In a German Pension (published 1911), she changed her name, Kathleen Beauchamp, to Katherine Mansfield. In the summer of 1914, she and her new companion, John Middleton Murry , a literary critic and essayist, acted as groomsmen for Lawrence's marriage to Frieda Weekley . In 1915, her brother Leslie fell in France as a soldier in the First World War , which was very bad for her. In 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In 1918 she married Murry. In the same year serious symptoms of her illness appeared for the first time; the strong cough never left her. Mansfield spent the last five years of her life (under frequent financial difficulties) traveling through Europe, finally in Fontainebleau near Paris , where she promised herself a cure from her lung disease as a student of the Greek-Armenian wisdom teacher Georges I. Gurdjieff in his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man . This hope was dashed in 1923.

Katherine Mansfield was buried in the Avon cemetery near Fontainebleau. A street in this city is named after her. A Katherine Mansfield Museum has been set up in the home where she was born in Wellington .

effect

"Her masterful, carefully structured short stories, which with great empathy, but sometimes also with bitter sharpness based on momentary impressions, convey insights into everyday life, among other things, of Wilhelmine Germany and the New Zealand society of her youth, are strongly determined by personal fateful experiences" According to the Brockhaus Encyclopedia - for example due to Mansfield's failed first marriage, the stillbirth of her child, the death of her brother, her incurable lung disease. Like DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, with whom she had a contradicting friendship, she was one of the most important representatives of modern Anglo-Saxon narrative literature.

When Virginia Woolf learned of Mansfield's death, she noted in her diary that she was jealous of Katherine Mansfield's gift for writing; besides her prose, there was no other she was ever jealous of. DH Lawrence was impressed by the unconventional life and artistic work of Katherine Mansfield's equally impressed: the ambivalent feelings they provoked in him, were reflected among other things in his portrait of Gudrun in the published 1920 novel Women in Love (dt. Women in Love ) .

As early as 1927, Meyer's Lexicon attested to Katherine Mansfield's prose as having “a simplicity, truth and inwardness reminding of Chekhov ”. For Kindler's Neues Literaturlexikon - which also draws a parallel to the Russian narrator - Mansfield's short stories are “extremely poor in action”; the atmospheric takes precedence over the actual fable, the impression over the event; it is more about character studies. Nevertheless, this reference work Mansfield is one of the pioneers of the modern English short story .

The Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors also expressly emphasizes the essential contribution that Katherine Mansfield made with her short stories to the development of avant-garde European modernism. Mansfield provided decisive impulses for the transformation and further development of the short story as a genre. Its dense, allusive and symbolic narrative style and the abandonment of a linear plot in favor of a leitmotif-based associative chain of episodes are reminiscent of the cinematic montage technique . Mansfield's stories are poetic prose, which directs one's gaze to what is supposedly unimportant and precisely describes sensory impressions. Their characteristic form of narration is difficult to classify; in literary criticism, her work is described as either impressionistic , post-impressionistic or symbolic .

In feminist literary criticism, Katherine Mansfield is seen above all as an outstanding representative and pioneer of female literature, who not only artfully expresses the insurmountable gap between the sexes in her leitmotifs and condensed symbols, but also criticizes gender roles in a subtle form and in her sensitive portraits of women reveal the sexual fears of their female characters.

Regardless of her literary success, Katherine Mansfield played an outsider role in contemporary English artistic circles and was never fully recognized due to her colonial origins. It was only in the last few years that the special position of Katherine Mansfield between the different cultures came into focus and encouraged New Zealand authors in particular to engage creatively with their life and work.

Works

  • In a German Pension , Short Stories, 1911, German In a German Pension , Haffmans bei Zweiausendundeins, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-86150-847-2 .
  • Prelude , Short Stories, 1918.
  • Bliss and other stories , short stories, 1920, German For six pence upbringing (published in 1937 by Herbert Reichner Vienna), also under the title Bliss .
  • The Garden Party and other short stories , Kurzgeschichten, 1922, German Das Gartenfest und other stories .
  • The doves' nest and other stories , short stories, 1923 posthumously, German Das Taubennest .
  • Something childish and other stories , short stories, 1924 posthumously, German Something childlike, but very natural .

expenditure

  • John Middleton Murry (Ed.): Journal of Katherine Mansfield , 1927, 1983 (German: Tagebuch . Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1975).
  • John Middleton Murry (Ed.): The letters , 1928 (two volumes).
  • Your big heart (selected stories), Frankfurt am Main 1959.
  • Complete stories (with an essay by Elisabeth Schnack), Cologne 1980, last new edition 2003.
  • Selected works (two volumes), Frankfurt am Main 1981.
  • Vincent O'Sullivan (Ed.): The aloe , 1982.
  • Life should be like a steady, visible light (letters, diaries, reviews), Frankfurt am Main 1983.
  • Elisabeth Schnack (Ed.): A Girl in New Zealand , Selected Volume, 1983.
  • Claire Tomalin (Ed.): The short stories , 13th edition 1983.
  • Clare Hanson (Ed.): The critical writings , 1987.
  • Elisabeth Schnack (ed.): Complete stories , 1988 (five volumes).
  • Max A. Schwendimann (Ed.): A marriage in letters , new edition 1988.
  • Margaret Scott (Ed.): The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (Notes, Drafts, Privates), 2001.
  • Heiko Arntz (Ed.): Complete Works , Frankfurt am Main 2009, 1049 pp.
  • All stories in two volumes . Edited and translated from English by Elisabeth Schnack. Diogenes Verlag 2012, 912 pp.

Bibliographies

  • Ruth Elvish Mantz: The Critical Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield , London 1931, new edition New York 1968.
  • Brownlee J. Kirkpatrick: A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield , Oxford 1989, ISBN 0-19-818401-8 .

literature

In German language

  • Jutta Rosenkranz: "‹ Every line is meant seriously. ›Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)". In: the same: line by line my paradise. Eminent women writers, 18 portraits . Piper, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-492-30515-0 , pp. 131-148.
  • Ingrid Mylo : Katherine Mansfield , Frankfurt am Main 1998.
  • Pietro Citati: Katherine Mansfield. A short life , Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-434-50432-X .
  • Ida Schöffling: Katherine Mansfield. Life and work in texts and images , Frankfurt am Main 1996.
  • Jochen Ganzmann: Preparation of the Modern. Aspects of narrative design in the short stories by James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield , Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-8204-9821-4 .
  • Nelson Wattie: Nation and Literature. A study to determine the national characteristics of literary works using the example of Katherine Mansfield's short stories , Bonn 1980, ISBN 3-416-01611-4 .
  • Claire Tomalin: Katherine Mansfield. A life story , (originally New York) Frankfurt am Main 1973, 1992.
  • Peter Halter: Katherine Mansfield and the short story. On the development and structure of a narrative form , Bern 1972.
  • Max A. Schwendimann: Katherine Mansfield. Your life in representation and documents , Munich 1967.
  • M. Andree: The attitude towards life of Katherine Mansfield , Münster 1950.
  • E. Clément-Sametz: Characters and motifs in Mansfield's short stories , Innsbruck 1940.

In English

  • Kathleen Jones: Katherine Mansfield. The Story-Teller , Edinburgh, Scotland 2010, ISBN 978-0-7486-4354-7 .
  • Shifen Gong: A fine pen. The Chinese view of Katherine Mansfield , Dunedin, New Zealand 2001, ISBN 1-877276-04-9 .
  • Marysa Demoor: Their fair share. Women, power and criticism in the Athenaeum, from Millicent Garrett Fawcett to Katherine Mansfield, 1870-1920 , Aldershot 2000, ISBN 0-7546-0118-8 .
  • Angela Smith: Katherine Mansfield. A literary life , Basingstoke 2000.
  • Angela Smith: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. A public of two , Oxford 1999, ISBN 0-19-818398-4 .
  • Katherine Murphy Dickson: Katherine Mansfield's New Zealand stories , Lanham 1998, ISBN 0-7618-1072-2 .
  • Pamela Dunbar: Radical Mansfield. Double discourse in Katherine Mansfield's short stories , Basingstoke 1997, ISBN 0-333-68782-5 .
  • Patricia Moran: Word of mouth. Body language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf , Charlottesville 1996, ISBN 0-8139-1675-5 .
  • Marianne Dada-Büchel: Katherine Mansfield's dual vision. Concepts of duality and unity in her fictional work , Tübingen 1995, ISBN 3-7720-2431-9 .
  • Jasper F. Kobler: Katherine Mansfield. A study of the short fiction , Boston / Massachusetts 1990, ISBN 0-8057-8325-3 .
  • Julia van Gunsteren: Katherine Mansfield and literary impressionism , Amsterdam 1990, ISBN 90-5183-199-4 .
  • Rhoda B. Nathan: Katherine Mansfield , New York 1988.
  • Kate Fullbrook: Katherine Mansfield. Brighton 1986.
  • Nora Crone: A portrait of Katherine Mansfield , Ilfracombe: Stockwell 1985, ISBN 0-7223-1862-6 .
  • Cherry A. Hankin: Katherine Mansfield and her confessional stories , London 1983, ISBN 0-333-31536-7 .
  • Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr: Katherine Mansfield , London 1981.
  • Antony Alpers: The Life of Katherine Mansfield , London 1980, 2nd edition New York 1980, ISBN 0-670-42805-1 .
  • Jeffrey Meyers: "Katherine Mansfield. A Biography", London 1978.
  • Mary Rohrberger: The Art of Katherine Mansfield , Ann Arbor / Michigan 1977.
  • MK Benet: Writers in Love , New York 1977, pp. 1-109.
  • Vincent O'Sullivan: Katherine Mansfields New Zeeland , London 1975.
  • Ida Baker: A Life for Katherine Mansfield. Memories , London 1971, Frankfurt am Main 1998.
  • Marvin Magalaner: The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield , Carbondale / Illinois 1971.
  • Saralyn R. Daly: Katherine Mansfield , New York 1965.
  • John Middleton Murry: Katherine Mansfield and Other Literary Studies , London 1959.
  • IA Gordon: Katherine Mansfield , London 1954 and 1971.
  • Sylvia L. Berkman: Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study , London 1951 and 1971.
  • Anne Friis: Katherine Mansfield. Life and stories , Munksgaard, Copenhagen 1946.
  • Ruth Elvish Mantz and John Middleton Murry: The Life of Katherine Mansfield , London 1933, reissued 1968.

Individual evidence

  1. See Roger Lipsey: Gurdjieff in a new light: His life, his work, his legacy, Xanten: Chalice Verlag, 2020, pages 101-109.
  2. Brockhaus Encyclopedia of the 19th edition, Volume 14 from 1991
  3. See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 377. See also Fembio , accessed on June 9, 2015, and Sandra Jobson Darroch: Katherine Mansfield: DH Lawrence's Lost Girl - A Literary Discovery. In: Rananim - The Journal of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia , 2009. Online [1] , accessed June 9, 2015.
  4. Meyer's Lexicon in the 7th edition Leipzig 1927
  5. ^ Edition Munich 1988
  6. See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 377f.
  7. See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 377f. See also e.g. B. Fembio , accessed June 9, 2015.
  8. See Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning , Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 378.

Web links

Commons : Katherine Mansfield  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files