Two new biographies of Mansfield win praise

Press, 1 April 1980, Page 23

Two new biographies of Mansfield win praise

NZPA Washington Two new biographies of Katherine Mansfield, one byiia New Zealander, have' just been published in the United States, attracting attention from the -“New York Times.” • j The newspaper spread an’ assessment of both : books over threq pages of its- influential Sunday , “Book Review” ‘ magazine I starting on the front, with •a -critic, Howard Moss, i noting: “Her work is tem- V i porarily in eclipse in ' I America, but there is hope ‘of-a reassessment." ? Moss said sno .English . 1 short-story writer, was more influential than I Mansfield in the. decades

between World War I and the 19505. He summed up the volumes: ‘‘Both books rescue a"’ ’complex' \ and heroic woman from the dullness of sanctity.” The books are “The Life of Katherine Mansfield” by Antony Alpers, a New Zealander teaching at Queen’s University, Ontario, and “Katherine Mansfield — a Biography” by another academic, Jeffrey Meyers. / ■ Alpers’S work is a revision and expansion of an earlier book. Moss says he “places, the-writer in a larger picture .and provides a valuable chronology, but he can be intrusive

and often fails to disi tinguish the important from the unimportant detail.” Of Mansfield who died in 1923, Moss says: “Mansfield’s reputation remains uncertain; she suffered the fate of the cult figure: the interest in her life has overtaken the work-itself.” But he describes her as “the only writer of this century who was devoted exclusively to . the story. Her ability to transform herself into someone else on a long, sustained lyrical note — the true mark of the good' story-writer — was a matter of impulse as well as skill.”