KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19762, 8 October 1927, Page 7 (Supplement)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD.

PUBLICATION OF JOURNAL. Several London papers recently devoted considerable space to references to the "Journal of Katherine Mansfield," which has just been published. Katherine Mansfield, who died in 192yJ, was a New Zealander. The Daily Express headings are " A Dying Woman's Wonderful Book," "Brave Katherine Mansfield,'' "Beautiful Mind." The reviewer of the paper says:—"The most distinctive woman writer of her generation was Katherine Mansfield, arid her journal is one of the most entirely beautiful and moving books that I have ever read. It is, of its nature, largely a record of illness. For the last five years of her life Katherine Mansfield was an invalid—not a mock invalid, but a young woman desperately ill—travelling from London to Paris, and from Paris to the south of France, and from the south of France back to London ag? in, in search not so much of health but of enough relief from illness for her to write what she wanted to write. "It is said that people in illness develop a heightened sensitiveness to all things. Katherine Mansfield had always an extraordinarily heightened sensitiveness. Some of the • descriptions of places, of people, in moods, in this book of hers have a clarity that is almost terrifying. But it is not the sensitiveness or the intellectual acuteness of the writing that makes it so deep an experience to road. It is the book's gaiety. "Into this scattered book, which is not only a journal but also contains letters, jingles of rhymes, ideas and sketches for stories to be used later, Katherine Mansfield put a gay, ironic beauty—worth two hundred ordinary than anything that ever came through in her published stories. It is a difficult — an impossible—book to quote from. . . . Reading through the book one gets the impression of knowing a person the last and deepest recesses of whose mind were beautiful and attractive. . . It is a wonderful book, full of callantry and beauty—worth two hundred ordinary novels." Even two years before she developed that pulmonary trouble which caused her death Katherine Mansfield was suffering from a rheumatic pain which had a pernicious- effect on the action of her heart. In December of 1915 she wrote; —"I've touched bottom. Even my heart doesn't heat any longer. I only keep alive by a kind of buzz of blood in my veins. Now the dark is coming back again; only at the windows there is a white glare. My ticks londlv and strongly on the bed table, as though it were rich with a minute life, while I faint—l die." The journal was edited by Katherine Mansfield's husband. Mr. J. Middleton Murry.