Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives explores how both the literary, cultural, editorial and biographical influence of French arts and philosophy, and life as an émigré in France shaped Mansfield’s evolution as a key modernist writer, while setting her within the geographies and cultural dynamics of Anglo-French modernism. Mansfield’s many stays in France were decisive in intellectual, personal and psychological terms: discovering ‘Murry’s Paris’ and the Left Bank; escaping to the War Zone to join Francis Carco; living as a civilian in wartime during the bombardments of Paris; travelling and finding lodgings as a single woman in war-ravaged towns; the experience of bereavement and debilitating ill-health abroad; and the joys and pitfalls for an outsider of a foreign land and idiom.

This book assesses the reason why Katherine Mansfield's reputation in France has always been greater than in England. It examines the ways in which the French reception of Mansfield has idealised her persona to the extent of crafting a hagiography. Mansfield is placed within the general literary context of her era, exploring French literary tendencies at the time and juxtaposing them with the main literary trends in England. The author determines the motives behind the French critics' desire to put Mansfield on a pedestal, discusses how the three years she spent on French soil influenced her writing and whether the translations of her work collude in the myth surrounding her personality. This book is the first sustained attempt to establish interconnections between her own French influences (literary and otherwise) and the myth-making of the French critics and translators. The book also follows the critical appraisal of Mansfield's life and work in France from her death up to the present day, by closely analysing the differing French critical responses. The author reveals how these various strands combine to create a legend which has little basis in fact, thereby demonstrating how reception and translation determine the importance of an author's reputation in the literary world.

"[KM was] the only writer I was ever jealous about." -- Virginia WoolfA gorgeous portrait of a complex and passionate author. Mansfield's literary career was on the rise when on her thirtieth birthday her doctors advised her to stop writing, move to a sanatorium, and quietly die of tuberculosis in six months. Unwilling to accept her death sentence, she became a wandering consumptive and traveled from London to Paris, to the Riviera, and up into the Alps in pursuit of a cure.Extracting Mansfield's correspondence and diaries, FitzPatrick captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer-her successes and disappointments-during her heroic battle against the debilitating disease that sapped her energy, derailed her marriage, and fostered a growing dependency on her devoted caregiver."One of the delights of the book, which adds to the poignancy and authenticity of the story as a whole, is the frequent use of direct passages taken from KM. This book will delight all KM devotees, who will relish another chance to live through the extraordinary life of KM-a life which never ceases to fascinate and move . . .. ---Dr. Gerri Kimber, The Katherine Mansfield Society

Reveals diverse notions of distributed cognition in the early Greek and Roman worlds

Reconsiders of Arendt's philosophy of natality in terms of biopolitical theory and feminism to defend women's reproductive choices

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years · Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism · Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing · Mansfield and modernist culture – from Bloomsbury to the little magazines · Mansfield and her contemporaries – Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim · Mansfield and the arts – visual culture, cinema and music The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the leading figures in the development of the modernist short story and her writings were a profound influence on writers such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Presenting for the first time draft manuscripts of some of her most important stories, this book gives scholars and students alike vivid new insight into Mansfield's creative process. With manuscripts for each text presented in facsimile and transcript, detailed notes throughout compare early drafts with later revisions and the final published work. In the final section of the book leading scholars offer vivid new critical readings exploring the manuscript history of these stories. A detailed descriptive listing of the major Mansfield archives is also included to help researchers explore the work further. The stories included are: 'Je ne parle pas francais'; 'Sun and Moon'; 'Revelations'; 'The Stranger'; 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'; 'Mr and Mrs Dove'; 'Marriage à la Mode'; 'The Voyage'; 'Six Years After'; 'The Fly'.

Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies at her heels. Dying at the age of only 34, she became posthumously one of the most influential writers of the last century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings her nearer than we have ever been to this haunted and haunting writer.

In line with the recent surge of critical interest in early psychology, the contributors read Mansfield's work alongside figures like William James and Henri Bergson, opening up new perspectives on affect in her work. While these essays trace strands within the intellectual milieu in which Mansfield came of age, others explore the intricate interplay between Mansfield's fiction and Freudian theory, seeing her work as emblematic of the uncanny doubling of modernist literature and psychoanalysis.