KATHERINE MANSFIELD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22504, 22 August 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

A CRITICAL ESSAY

Admirers of Katherine Mansfield are for the most part happ.v to accept her stories nt. their face value. The best of these have a quality which persists in the memory in spite of ten, or fifteen vears is it ? —of continual and miscellaneous reading. "Beauty ' as Eric Gill reminds us " looks after itself. But there are many people interested in the craft of literature who will hail Professor Sew ell s critical essay oil Katherine Mansfield with enthusiasm. His immediate and unqualified acceptance of her unique position in English literature, and the warmth and brilliance of his examination of her particular craft carries tlie hour, and* it isr possibl v not until the second reading that (laws become apparent. Katherine Mansfield had a passion for communication and it is from her journal and copious letters that Professor Sewell obtains his most relevant material. To find set forth in no more than six small pages her own illumin-

atmg notes on lior method, her moods, hor ninnv ways of convoying through Iho medium ot hor stories "So this is what life is, is it:'" makes exhilarating reading tor the student. Professor Sewell makes it increasingly clear that the purity of her style and vision was the outcome of her decision to "accept" life, and it was this fundamental acceptance that provided her with the detachment which made the vital inner life of her stories.

The first half of Professor Sewell's criticism is the most illuminating. It submerges the reader in a delicious Katherine Mansfield world, but almost on the brink of revelation the spell is broken. The cifuse appears to be lack of simplicity. The suggestion of a platform manner is apparent in his tendency to make, for the sake of dramatic effect, a mystery of a simple statement. His plav with the word "sediment" and the mystery with which he surrounds its meaning is an illustration of this manner of writing. Nor does the thrusting forward ot his personal dislike of A. A. Milne's Christopher Hobin poems advance his criticism of Katherine Mansfield, although, were the reader studying Professor Sewell it would be interesting as an illustration of his ignorance of the normal child's taste.

Professor Sewell dwells on the "lyric" form of Miss Mansfield's prose, on her notable sense of form, on the loveliness of her young girls and on the perfection of her child characters. He speaks at length on the purity of vision which enables Katherine Mansfield to enter into children's lives; but surely it would he more "exactly true" to say that the children in her stories are her cousins, her sister and herself—always herself. She writes of actual children and actual happenings. Nor does he underline the essential femininity that |»ermoates her writing. With the exception of Virginia Woolt in "Mrs. Dalloway" no other woman writer has with such exquisite unselfconsciousness revelled ill her femininity. Professor Sewell claims for her that she enlarged the potentialities of the Knglish language; that she made something out of words quite new and unthoughtof ; that she wrought a new. texture in prose. Perhaps she did. It reads very much like overstatement, although it is a "wordy" claim that might be made for any literary genius. To say that " she conveyed the troubled inwardness of life more directly, more purely than any other writer" expresses more nearly what the fastidious reader feels about her. "Kntherine Mansfield," hy Arthur Sewell. (Unicorn Press.) V