Introduction

Only one of KM’s letters to A. R. Orage, the influential editor of the British periodical the New Age, survives. As Antony Alpers notes in his biography of KM, Orage ‘was almost violently opposed to the keeping and publication of private letters’. The fact that he decided to keep this letter of thanks and ‘love’, sent by KM at a time when she was receiving significant praise in the press following the publication of Bliss and Other Stories, indicates the value Orage attached to the sentiments of ‘admiration and gratitude’ which the letter conveys. Desmond MacCarthy’s review of Bliss, printed on 21 January 1921 in the New Statesman, had opened with the observation: ‘Miss Mansfield’s master in the art of fiction is Tchehov.’ This is a claim that few critics of KM’s work are likely to dispute, but her letter to Orage below can be seen as a direct riposte to this review, which she knew Orage would have seen. KM writes: ‘My dear Orage, I cannot tell you how often I call to mind your conversation or how often, in writing, I remember my master.’

Orage was not born ‘Alfred Richard’ but, in fact, ‘James Alfred’ (for some reason, his nickname since childhood had always been ‘Dickie’). He was born on 22 January 1873 at Dacre, near Bradford, Yorkshire, the last of four children. Soon after his father’s death in 1875, the young Orage moved with his mother and siblings to his maternal grandparents’ village, Fenstanton, twelve miles outside Cambridge. The son of a widow, Orage grew up in very modest circumstances, but his keen intellect quickly caught the attention of the village schoolmaster, George Hicks, and the local squire’s son, Howard Coote, who gave Orage not only the run of his library but also the financial support which enabled Orage to enrol on a teacher training programme in Oxfordshire. In 1893, at the age of twenty, Orage returned to Yorkshire to take a job at Chapel Allerton elementary school in Leeds. This was also the year in which the Independent Labour Party was formed.

Introduction

Eric Seabrooke Pinker was born on 29 November 1891 in Chiswick, the eldest of the three children of James Brand Pinker and Mary Elizabeth Pinker (née Seabrooke). After attending St Edmund’s School in Surrey as a boarder, he was a student at Westminster School from September 1905 to December 1908. Pinker enlisted in the army in April 1914, several months before the outbreak of World War One, and he remained in service for nearly five years: in 1915, he served in Egypt, and was then in France from July 1916, receiving the Military Cross in January 1918. Around February 1919, Pinker entered his father’s firm, James B. Pinker and Son (for more information, please see my Introduction to James Brand Pinker in this volume, p. 445). On 19 May 1921, Pinker married Margit Vibege Watney and, after his father’s sudden death in February 1922, took over the business. All of KM’s letters to Eric Pinker were therefore written in the short period between James Pinker’s demise and her own death the following January. These letters, written in the clipped manner of business correspondence, show KM negotiating serial rights for her stories on both sides of the Atlantic, and her loyalty to Constable & Co. as her preferred publisher.

After KM’s death, Pinker continued to place her work in magazines across the American market, as evidenced in the extensive correspondence held in the firm’s archives at Northwestern University. In 1925, Eric’s younger brother, James Ralph Pinker, joined the family firm; in 1926, his wife filed for divorce, and Pinker married the American actress Adrienne Morrison the following year. After Pinker emigrated to the United States in 1930, leaving his brother James to run the London office as vice-president, he established a New York branch of the family firm (named J. B. Pinker and Son, Inc., while the London branch remained James B. Pinker and Son). At this point, the agency’s description changed to ‘Literary, Dramatic and Motion Picture (or Film) Agents’, and Pinker’s wife became an active partner in the business. The agency was hit hard by the financial depression of the 1930s, however, and both brothers responded by embezzling client funds. In March 1939, Eric Pinker was arrested in New York City on charges of grand larceny.

Introduction

Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler was born on 25 December 1888, the only child of the educational pioneer and art patron Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861–1943), Chancellor of Leeds University and renowned collector of post-Impressionist paintings. The son later adopted an early variant of the family name, Sadleir, as a nom de plume to distinguish himself from the father. Sadleir was educated at Rugby School and then at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied History and befriended JMM. Having already published a volume of his own poetry in 1907, Lappalien, Sadleir helped JMM establish the little magazine Rhythm in 1911 while they were still undergraduates, bringing to the venture not only his father’s financial backing (£50) but also his connections to the post-Impressionist art world. In 1911, the two men travelled to Paris to ask the artist J. D. Fergusson if they could use his painting Rhythm – which they had seen in the Autumn Salon – as both the title and cover image for the magazine they were planning to publish. Although it was Fergusson who served as art editor for the first year, sourcing visual contributions to Rhythm, it was Sadleir who should be credited with explaining and promoting these trends in modern art to readers in articles that helped to secure the magazine’s place as an important disseminator of Modernism in Britain. In the first issue, published in June 1911, Sadleir praised the work of Anne Estelle Rice in an article titled ‘Fauvism and a Fauve’, admiring her ‘rhythmical’ use of ‘strong flowing line’ and the decorative effect created by ‘massed colour’ (impossible to reproduce in the two-tone printing of the magazine, of course). Other modern artists discussed by Sadleir in the pages of Rhythm include Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, André Derain and Wassily Kandinsky, whose Über das Geistige in der Kunst Sadleir translated into English as The Art of Spiritual Harmony, published in 1914.

KM’s first contributions to Rhythm were printed in March 1912, and by the next issue, which began a new volume of the magazine, she was listed as an assistant editor alongside Sadleir.

Introduction

James Brand Pinker was the most pre-eminent literary agent of the early twentieth century: his client list included authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Jack London, Stephen Crane, George Gissing, Ford Madox Ford, Violet Hunt, George Egerton, Rebecca West, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce. The role of ‘literary agent’ was a phenomenon of the late nineteenth century, when authorship was becoming increasingly professionalised and literature ever more commercialised. As Mary Ann Gillies notes: ‘from the beginning, professional literary agents were characterized as middlemen who brokered deals between sellers and buyers of literary property. One consequence of this conception of agenting was the ethical dilemma about where the agent’s primary loyalty resided’: with the author or with the publisher. From the beginning of his career, Pinker made it clear that his first allegiance was to the author, and he carved out a unique position for himself within this new literary marketplace by supporting the untried writer and untested work, presenting himself as the champion of new authors and new literature. In this way, Pinker was able to distinguish his firm from competitor agencies such as Curtis Brown and A. P. Watt and Son, and his name became indelibly associated with Modernist literature. Pinker provided experimental writers with the same support and opportunities he afforded to more marketable, commercially viable clients. It is no wonder, therefore, that KM sought his services not once but twice, eventually securing Pinker as her agent in 1921.

Not much is known about Pinker’s early life, beyond the fact that he was born to James and Mary Brand Pinker in 1863. After working as a clerk at Tilbury Docks in London for just over a year, Pinker travelled to Constantinople in 1887 to work as a foreign correspondent for the Levant Herald. He married Mary Elizabeth Seabrooke in 1888. From a very modest background, Pinker’s marriage changed his material fortunes; his wife’s family had made money in the brewing business, and it is likely that the marriage enabled Pinker to leave his job in Turkey to pursue his journalistic ambitions in London.

Introduction

The New Age was founded in 1894 as a Christian socialist journal, edited by the High Anglican Joseph Clayton before it was purchased in 1907 with money provided by George Bernard Shaw and the Theosophist banker Lewis Alexander Wallace, who each stumped up £500 in order to see A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson take up the editorial reins. The new series began in May 1907 under a new subtitle, ‘An Independent Socialist Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’. Shaw hoped that the periodical would provide an organ for socialist debate, and in its first year under the co-editorship of Orage and Jackson the New Age essentially served as a wing of the Fabian Society. However, while the subtitle was changed to ‘A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art’ in November 1907, the New Age maintained its commitment to socialism without ever subscribing to any particular policy, party or faction. By the second volume, and after Jackson’s departure in February 1908, Orage shifted attention away from Fabianism, turning the New Age into a far more motley, diverse and culturally dynamic periodical than Shaw had probably envisaged: over the course of Orage’s fifteen years as editor, the New Age provided one of the most important breeding grounds for the emergence of literary and artistic Modernism in early twentieth-century Britain (for more information about his biography and contemporary standing, please see my introduction to Orage in this volume).

The New Age came out every Thursday and was edited from a small office in a courtyard off Chancery Lane, London. Visually, there was nothing eye-catching about the periodical: the New Age was sparse and unassuming, and with its double-column layout and cheap paper quality it looked and felt much like a newspaper, or one of the austere weeklies of the Victorian era. However, such cost-cutting (and the fact that many writers contributed copy for free, earning the periodical the nickname ‘The No Wage’) enabled Orage to keep the New Age priced competitively at one penny. Within months of his editorship, he had established a recognisable format that was maintained consistently across the years with very few alterations: each issue opened with the editorial ‘Notes of the Week’ and was then followed by political commentary, with a cartoon or lithograph splitting this section from the second half of the paper, devoted to art and literature.

The genre of each item is indicated at the end of the reference. Each item is signed ‘Katherine Mansfield’ unless otherwise stated at the beginning of the reference in brackets. Posthumous publications are not included in this appendix, and any information about disputed authorship is given in the notes.

[Kathleen Beauchamp] ‘Enna Blake’, High School Reporter (1898), pp. 21–2: fiction

[Kathleen Beauchamp] ‘A Happy Christmas Eve’, High School Reporter (1899), pp. 3–4: fiction

[Kathleen M. Beauchamp] ‘His Little Friend’, New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 25.15 (13 October 1900), pp. 710–11: fiction

[Cousin Kathleen], New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 25.20 (17 November 1900), p. 950: letter

[Kathleen Beauchamp], New Zealand Graphic and Ladies’ Journal, 26.23 (8 June 1901), p. 1098: letter

[Kathleen Beauchamp] ‘The Pine-Tree, The Sparrows, and You and I’, Queen's College Magazine (1903), pp. 74–6: fiction

[Kathleen Beauchamp] ‘Die Einsame’, Queen's College Magazine (March 1904), pp. 126–31: fiction

[Kathleen M. Beauchamp] ‘Your Birthday’, Queen's College Magazine (December 1904), pp. 203–5: fiction

[K. M. Beauchamp] ‘One Day’, Queen's College Magazine (July 1905), pp. 294–5: fiction

[K. M. Beauchamp] ‘About Pat’, Queen's College Magazine (December 1905), pp. 344–7: fiction

[K. Mansfield] ‘Vignettes’, Native Companion, 2.3 (1 October 1907), pp. 129–32: fiction

[K. Mansfield] ‘Silhouettes’, Native Companion, 2.4 (1 November 1907), p. 229: fiction

[K. Mansfield] ‘In a Cafe’, Native Companion, 2.5 (2 December 1907), pp. 265–9: fiction

[Julian Mark] ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, Native Companion, 2.5 (2 December 1907), pp. 285–6: fiction

[Kathleen Beauchamp] ‘The Lonesome Child’, Dominion, 1.217 (6 June 1908), p. 11: poetry

[K. Mansfield] ‘Study: The Death of a Rose’, Triad (1 July 1908), p. 35: fiction

[Unsigned] ‘Almost a Tragedy: The Cars on Lambton Quay’, Dominion (23 December 1908), p. 11: fiction

[K. Mansfield] ‘The Education of Audrey’, Evening Post (30 January 1909), p. 12: fiction

[K. M. Beauchamp] ‘A Day in Bed’, Lone Hand, 5.1 (1 October 1909), p. 636: poetry

[K. Mansfield], ‘November’, Daily News (3 November 1909): poetry

[K. Mansfield] ‘The Pillar Box’, Pall Mall Magazine, 45.202 (February 1910), p. 300: poetry

(The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.)

Lord Henry in ‘Dorian Gray’

Yvonne moved slowly up the long, brilliantly lighted Concert Hall. She bowed slightly to several acquaintances, faintly conscious of the men's admiring glances and the women's air of eager familiarity.

Suddenly she felt a slight pull at her skirt, and, looking down, saw Mrs Mason, a stout, moustached woman in an aggressively decollete dress, smiling and holding out her hand.

‘Good evening, Mrs Mason,’ said Yvonne, smiling also, and pressing the hand gently.

‘Good evening, Lady Mandeville… . All alone? I hope that your husband's not seedy?’

‘He's a little afraid that he's catching a cold in the head,’ Yvonne replied, ‘so thought it better to stay by the fire and nurse himself.’

‘O very wise, very wise indeed,’ said Mrs Mason, ruffling the lace on her bosom until she had all the appearance of a pigeon, ‘sickness is so very prevalent just now.’

‘Yes, wretchedly so,’ answered Yvonne.

‘My Ethel has had a frightful nosey cold and now it's gone to her chest with a horrid loose cough. Of course she makes a great fuss but I know the secret of all these things – good strong mustard plasters.’

‘Is that so,’ said Yvonne. She glanced at Mrs Mason's stout red arms and shivered slightly.

‘I hope you’re not catching anything,’ continued Mrs Mason, ‘you’re looking a little puffy about the eyes, my dear.’

She turned to a small pale woman seated beside her, whose paleness was accentuated by a great cluster of scarlet geraniums and maidenhair fern which crept up her left shoulder… . ‘May I introduce my friend Mrs Wood – ‘

‘ How do you do?’ said Yvonne, and moved to her seat.

‘What a distinguished looking woman,’ said Mrs Wood, ‘such grace, Amelia – she looks like a Du Maurier picture, doesn't she?’

In May 1911 the art and theatre critic Huntly Carter reported in The New Age that the ‘intuitional philosophy of Bergson – a system of philosophy for elevating and making vision more penetratingly human – has so taken possession of Paris that the spirit of it seems to fill every place’. Carter summarised Henri Bergson's philosophy as the ‘modern principles of continuity and rhythm’ and praised the second wave of Fauvist artists then exhibiting at the Societe des Artists Independants, and headed by the expatriates J. D. Fergusson, Anne Estelle Rice and Jessica Dismorr, for their ‘lyrics in colour, lyrics in line, lyrics in light to the new deity, rhythm’ (my emphasis). Carter's articles elicited a response in the correspondence pages of The New Age from John Middleton Murry, who reaffirmed the celebration of Paris as ‘the great cosmopolis’ and ‘the very cross-roads of Continental ideas’ and ‘advanced art’. Praising the new post-impressionist artists named by Carter for having applied Bergson's philosophy with ‘the most comprehensive and vital results’, Murry delighted in the fact that the new movement had ‘sufficed at once to enrage and confound its critics’ in England. This letter to The New Age announced Murry's arrival on the London literary scene, and in the same month of June 1911 he published the first issue of a magazine devoted to Bergson's philosophy and Fauvist art that derived its title from the ‘new deity’: Rhythm.

Murry had met the artists Fergusson and Rice by chance on his first visit to Paris in the winter of 1910 in the Cafe d’Harcourt. In his autobiography, he recalled the importance of the word ‘rhythm’ in his early conversations with Fergusson:

• 1. Repentance is the duster with which we sop up the spilt milk. It serves its estimable purpose but is nothing but a damp rag afterwards to be thrown into the soiled linen bag.

• 2. Love is the germ – passion the disease.

• 3. Take Regret as your mistress but never make her your wife. For she will hang about your neck and twine her arms around your body, and she is heavy to hold as the dead are heavy. Take Regret as your mistress but never make her your wife – for her body is salt to taste with the tears of a thousand lovers and her womb is barren.

• 4. If a man bore in mind the fact that when he chose his wife his wife also chose him, there would be less talk of the equality of the sexes and more realisation.

• 5. The average Englishwoman imagines that every Frenchman is a devil – with his horns only half concealed under an opera hat.

• 6. If you wish to live you must first attend your own funeral.

• 7. People are charmingly conservative. The story of the Garden of Eden is practically the only plot to fill and refill out West End theatres and the pages of our magazines… . Domestic felicity destroyed by a twentieth-century serpent in an embroidered shirt front and that dangerous little gift which Eve … hands to her husband.

• 8. Before confessing be perfectly certain that you do not wish to be forgiven.

• 9. I keep the God of my childhood hanging around my neck by a string, like a little camphor bag – an old-fashioned remedy for warding off infectious and dangerous complaints. Of course there is one disadvantage … when I wear evening dress … it is impossible. Most women do the same – that is why men find my sex so far more vulnerable when they are decollete.

• 10. Enough for the Present – yet they say no woman is ever satisfied – yet she does not wish you to give her a Past.

• 11. Life's a game of cards – which mainly consists of shuffling.

• 12. It took a woman to realise the fact that the greatness of great men depends mainly upon the length of their hair.

• 13. Easy enough to strike a match – but it requires experience to keep a fire burning.

On 9 January 1923, Katherine Mansfield died at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Fontainebleau, established by the mystic philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff, at the age of just thirty-four. In his letter of condolence to Murry, D. H. Lawrence was uncharacteristically generous, suggesting that ‘[p]erhaps it is good for Katharine [sic] not to have seen the next phase’: ‘It has been a savage enough pilgrimage these last four years. Perhaps K. has taken the only way for her. We keep faith – I always feel death only strengthens that, the faith between those who have it.’ In the same letter, Lawrence also told Murry that he would ask his publisher to send his latest work, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which he wished Mansfield could have read: ‘She’ll know though’, he wrote. ‘The dead don't die. They look on and help.’

This was a defining moment for Murry. In February 1923, he retreated to the solitude of a cottage in the forest of Twyford in Sussex, where he read Fantasia of the Unconscious as he came to terms with his grief. It was here, inspired by Lawrence's descriptions of primary pre-mental consciousness, that Murry underwent a profound mystical experience that he later described as ‘the one entirely revolutionary happening’ in his life. This experience seemed to confirm Murry in the belief that the ‘dead don't die’ but instead ‘look on and help’. In July 1923, he recounted these events:

In one of the translations that Mansfield produced with Koteliansky for publication in The Athenaeum, Anton Chekhov notes: ‘The thought that I am writing for a weighty magazine, and that my little thing will be looked upon more seriously than it deserves, keeps on jerking my elbow, as the devil did the monk’. Whether writing for an established and ‘weighty’ literary journal such as The Athenaeum, an avant-garde little magazine such as Rhythm, or a periodical positioned somewhere between, such as The New Age, Mansfield's periodical contributions consistently bear out this observation that print contexts indelibly shape what a writer produces; that a writer's elbow will always feel the pull and the tug of the publication to which they are contributing. Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture has sought to demonstrate the extent to which Mansfield's writings are laden with meanings that will always remain hidden to the reader who isolates the text from the original print contexts of publication. In the relational model of creation sustained by periodicals and magazines, all contributions have the potential to condition the meanings of other contributions. Reading Mansfield's writings within these contexts therefore enables us to situate her work more resolutely as historically embedded within particular political, aesthetic and social debates, and as produced through networks of association with other writers and artists.

This approach to Mansfield's work positions her as an important female figure in the history of early twentieth-century periodical culture. Over recent years, the burgeoning field of feminist periodical studies has led to increasing attention being paid to the significant, formative role played by women writers and editors in the emergence of literary modernism. Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture enlarges this field of enquiry, highlighting the ways in which Mansfield's periodical contributions responded to the suffrage movement and articles about feminism in The New Age, for instance, and presented a gendered critique of other contributions to Rhythm. Similarly, this book highlights the crucial editorial role performed by Beatrice Hastings at The New Age, as well as Mansfield's own significance as an editor of Rhythm and The Blue Review.

Katherine Mansfield viewed her literary career through the prism of periodical publication. Written in the summer of 1921, the above draft of a letter composed in one of her notebooks provides a striking illustration of how Mansfield presented her credentials to others and assessed her reputation as a writer prior to the publication of her most successful short story collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, in that annus mirabilis of literary modernism, 1922. Comprising satirical sketches first printed in the political weekly The New Age, Mansfield's first short story collection, In a German Pension, was published at the end of 1911. It was another nine years before she published another book, with Bliss and Other Stories appearing in December 1920. In the intervening years, however, Mansfield was prolific in her output, contributing work to ‘little magazines’ such as Rhythm, The Blue Review and The Signature, to established periodicals such as The New Age and The Athenaeum, as well as making brief appearances in diverse publications such as T.P.'s Weekly, The Saturday Westminster Gazette, The Times Literary Supplement and The English Review. Before the publication of The Garden Party in 1922, therefore, it was as a contributor to magazines and periodicals on which Mansfield's reputation hinged; indeed, even with The Garden Party in circulation, Wyndham Lewis could still describe her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. Encompassing a dismissive attitude towards Mansfield's nationality as well as disdain for the kind of mass-market magazines for which she was beginning to write, Lewis's comment was certainly not meant as a compliment, but his pithy characterisation speaks volumes about how Mansfield was viewed by her contemporaries.

In June 1920, Katherine Mansfield set down her most developed exposition of what she understood by modern short fiction in a review for The Athenaeum titled ‘Wanted, a New Word’. Clare Hanson has described this as ‘virtually the only “manifesto” KM produced for the kind of fiction she herself wrote’. When Murry later collected this review in Novels and Novelists (1930), however, he erroneously gave it the title ‘Wanted, a New World’, which was then subsequently used in Hanson's edition of The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (1987) and in B. J. Kirkpatrick's A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (1989). This slippage not only calls attention to the mutability of Mansfield's writing as it passed through different textual transmissions, encouraging us to return to the original sites of publication in periodicals and magazines, but also suggests a direct correlation between her ideas of modernist formal experimentation and a geographical imaginary of discovery.

Indeed, after the death of her brother in October 1915, when Mansfield travelled to the south of France, she made a series of famous notebook entries linking her commitment to finding a new ‘form’ with making the ‘undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world’. The ‘form that I would choose has changed utterly’, she wrote, addressing her brother; ‘I feel no longer concerned with the same appearance of things’:

Mansfield instinctively reaches for a spatial vocabulary of empire when thinking about writing and language here, positioning herself as a New Zealander narrating the colonial nation (the ‘new world’) within the context of the European ‘old world’.