Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield

“There was something almost eerie about it, as though of a psychic transformation rather than a mere impersonation,” he told Mansfield’s biographer Antony Alpers, before adding that she had looked, draped in her flamboyant scarf, “like Oscar Wilde.”Ī.R. The first time they met Mansfield was “inconspicuous and somewhat demure,” while the second time she was dressed theatrically in “more or less Maori fashion.” (Mansfield was born and raised in New Zealand, and left it forever at the age of nineteen.) Nearly half a century later Bowden was still disturbed by the opposing versions of the same figure, one fading silently into the background, the other loudly announcing her presence. With the help of her second husband, John Middleton Murry, she created the character he called the “perfectly exquisite, perfectly simple human being,” and it was this mawkishly sanctified Mansfield whom Murry ceaselessly promoted after her death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.Īccording to her first husband, George Bowden, there was nothing simple about her. For what with complexes and suppressions and reactions and vibrations and reflections-there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests. Which self? Which of my many-well, really, thats what it looks like coming to-hundreds of selves. “True to oneself!” she scoffed in a journal entry. Bendall, Kathë Beauchamp-Bowden, Juliet, Vere, Ariadne, Sally, Pearl, and Guy and she published stories, poems, reviews, and editorials under the names Lili Heron, Julian Mark, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, the Tiger, Boris Petrovsky, K.M., and Katherine Mansfield. Her pseudonyms included Katya, Katerina, Kissienka, Katoushka (the Russian variations of her name) her Maori personae were Kezia, Rewa, Tui, and Maata she also referred to herself as Kass, Katharina, Kathë Schonfeld, Mrs.

Kathleen Beauchamp was a shapeshifter with as many selves as Stendhal.

Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield