Of the more than 120 books Mansfield reviewed for the Athenaeum between April 1919 and the end of 1920, there were fewer than a dozen collections of short stories. Most of what Murry chose to assign to her were inferior novels. Occasionally her reviews were too easily dismissive, as with a reprint of George Moore’s Esther Waters, or when she failed to engage with E. M. Forster or Gertrude Stein as seriously as she might have done. Almost always though her writing is alert, focused, stylish, witty, and at times impressively generous. Yet there is little we can take from her Athenaeum columns that tell us much about what she demanded or hoped for in the short story. Only infrequently does a sentence bear on her own writing, or on the form she is famous for, as in her praise for writing that echoes Chekhov’s melding of symbolism and naturalism to intensify our awareness ‘of the rain pattering on the roof all night long, of the languid, feverish wind, of the moonlit orchard and the fi rst snow, passionately realized, not indeed as analogies for a state of mind, but as linking that mind to the larger whole.’1 Or when, writing admiringly of the Belgian Louis Couperus, she draws a distinction between those who merely depict life, and those who ‘by accepting life [. . .] question it profoundly’.

1.

June, 1922

All week the clouds have been lowering themselves into the valley.

Now a torrent of rain comes to darken the sky, lashing around the hotel.

‘Quickly Berthe,’ Madame Gay-Crosier, calls to me, ‘we must make sure all the shutters are closed.’ My mistress always relies on me to obey instructions promptly; she is somewhat heavy and, being middle-aged, not able to get around the hallways and corridors as nimbly as I can.

And after all, there are so many rooms.

One suite in particular I must check with urgency. It is on the second floor, the north wing, and the hotel has guests coming this afternoon, La Petite Anglaise and her husband; they will stay in the suite for their duration: two rooms which, although simple, smell of pinewood, and comprise a large bedroom, with a small reception area (why do the English always insist on calling such an area a ‘living room’!) and a vestibule off to one side with a writing desk.

Ah, the writing desk. It is an arresting and handsome piece of furniture, antique, which Madame Gay-Crosier ordered the valet, Gabriel, to bring specially from her own rooms. ‘My little bureau,’ she addressed it fondly as it was put into place. ‘Who knows what beautiful words the small Englishwoman will compose on you, no?’

La Petite Anglaise’s husband was insistent that there must be a desk.

‘For my wife,’ he wrote when giving instructions, ‘if possible having a view across the mountains.’ Perhaps he was hoping that the Muse would be as beneficent to the famous writer as she was when La Petite Anglaise was in Montana last year.

It’s fair to say that the fi gure of the ‘man alone’ is a central trope in New Zealand literary studies. These two books consider the man alone theme, albeit in radically different ways. Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross propose that John Mulgan’s seminal novel Man Alone (1939) belongs to a subcategory of the ‘man alone’ topos, one based on the isolation of fugitives and escapees who cannot be assimilated into social networks (50). This is a fairly standard view compared with Alex Calder’s playful re-reading of the novel within the frame of the Western genre. Although Man Alone lacks the trappings of the Western genre, Calder argues, it is plotted along an identical trail, with multiple escapes from the city and from women who threaten the hero’s freedom (232). Within New Zealand studies, Calder observes, the cultural history of the 1930s is often viewed in terms of a narrowly-focused nationalism instead of considering the possibilities of American cultural productions, such as the Western and the music associated with it.

This book is the fi rst biography of Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky (1880–1955), a prominent translator of Ukrainian Jewish origin, who was closely involved with many important British cultural figures in the 1910s–1940s, including Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, H. G. Wells, Mark Gertler and Dilys Powell. Although Koteliansky’s collaborations with several Bloomsbury writers and critics have been discussed before, the present study sheds new light on Koteliansky’s personality and his personal relationships with many artists and writers in London. Diment points out that ‘[h]is English friends would invariably call him a “rabbi” or “an Old Testament prophet”’, and ‘[f]or a secular Jew, Koteliansky was indeed interestingly rabbinical in the way he conducted his life in England’ (9). She defines him as bookish and authoritative, especially because he spent most of his life worshipping books written by Russian canonical writers, including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.

Undoubtedly, Koteliansky’s friendship and professional interaction with British writers and critics had a signifi cant impact on their reception of Russian realist and modernist writers. His correspondence with Mansfi eld and Lawrence also provides a fascinating insight into the dialogue between the two cultural traditions. Although Koteliansky appears to have been in love with Mansfield and his feelings were not reciprocated, their friendship proved to be very special. Clearly, Mansfield saw him as a soulmate since she admitted to him that he was one of her kind of people. Diment does not explore their feelings of displacement in the context of postcolonial writing and gender studies, but it might not be far-fetched to suggest that Mansfield’s own identity as a New Zealander and a female writer shared many common features with a provincial Jewish translator and critic from the south of Russia.

‘“Oh, mother, it is still raining, and you say I can’t go out.” It was a girl who spoke; she looked about ten’ (1: 3). The schoolgirl who wrote this was nine years old. Her name was Kathleen Beauchamp, whom the world would come to admire as Katherine Mansfield, an undisputed master of the short story. The sentence is the opening of her first published short story. Titled ‘Enna Blake’, it appeared in the High School Reporter - the periodical of Wellington Girls’ High School, which Mansfield attended from May 1898 until May 1899 - in the second term of 1898. An editorial comment recorded that the story showed ‘promise of great merit’ (1: 4), an accurate prediction indeed, even though that talented girl would not live beyond the age of thirty-four. Yet in spite of her short life - burned out by the unforgiving fire of tuberculosis - Mansfield produced a monumental body of work. Over 200 stories and fragments have been collected for the first time in this two-volume edition. Her collected poetry, non-fiction and diaries are to be published soon in a similar, two-volume edition.

Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925 is an important and masterful analysis of the romance novel set in the wider context of emerging modernism and the notable shift in the literary hierarchies that accompanied it. The express intention of the book is to redress the ‘romance gap in our literary-historical record’ by focusing on a small group of romances that best exemplify ‘the meteoric rise of once best-selling texts’ (xii) by authors such as Mary Ward and Marie Corelli.

This sounds as though it could be an analysis that attaches importance to the notion of limited literary classifi cation, especially because the Introduction and first chapter alert us to hierarchies of artistic and cultural ‘brows’ into which we might slip thoughtlessly the romances under discussion. This is not Hipsky’s aim, however. Rather, he offers a challenge to twenty-first century scholars of modernism and illuminates the ‘continuities and frictions’ (xiii) between those texts considered popular and those deemed to be modernist in what he calls a ‘zone of convergence’ (xv). Instead of focusing on narrative and stylistic differences, his argument centres on commonality and ‘complementarity of affect’ (219). He suggests, for instance, that the best-selling romances of 1885–1925 offer representations of interiority that parallel the ‘more self-conscious forms of psychic intensity’ (xv) explored by, amongst others, Mansfi eld, Woolf and Lawrence. He is persuasive in connecting the quest for moments of modernist transcendence with the climatic, ‘escapist’ scenes of several romance novels, which also, like Mansfield’s ‘blazing moments’ in particular, foreground the ultimate impossibility of achieving such a goal.