Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Re-forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2018), 325 pp., $40. ISBN 9783838211138

Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Olga Taxidou, eds, The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 432 pp., £150. ISBN 9780748637027

Chris Mourant, Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 320 pp., £80. ISBN 9781474439459 John Newton, Hard Frost: Structures of Feeling in New Zealand Literature 1908–1945 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2018), 368 pp., $40. ISBN 9781776561629

C. K. Stead, The Necessary Angel (London: Allen & Unwin UK, 2018), 240 pp., £15.99. ISBN 9781760631154

When Katherine Mansfield writes to John Middleton Murry in May 1913 ‘there aren't any superfluous words: I mean every line of it […] Im a powerful stickler for form in this style of work’,1 she is not simply refusing to cut down a satirical piece written for The Blue Review but is affirming what Chris Mourant describes in Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture as ‘one of the best-known statements on the importance of form in her work’ (p. 170). Mourant's monograph amply demonstrates that Mansfield's experimenting with the shapes and styles of the short story cannot be understood without attending to the formation of the various periodical magazines in which she published many of them for the first time. When this is read alongside the other books reviewed here, we are reminded that we can only understand Mansfield's modernist aesthetics if we also take seriously her role as essayist, poet, aphorist, editor and translator.

This chapter introduces the volume’s central premise that the uneasy relationship between Bloomsbury’s broad influence and perceived elitism is precisely why it continues to gain traction in critical debates. Instead of viewing the group as either radicals or gatekeepers, it is necessary to grapple with Bloomsbury’s imperialist biases and class complacencies at the same time as we resituate the group’s innovative aesthetics, transgressive relationships, and varied involvement in public life in national and global contexts. In response to Raymond Williams’ classic 1980 essay “The Bloomsbury Fraction” – which in considering Bloomsbury’s social position as an upper-class “fraction” settles into a relatively stable description of the group’s form – I propose friction as a more tangible and productive concept to explore Bloomsbury and its lasting contribution to culture.

This chapter explores the significance of a bookshop set up in Bloomsbury in 1919 by the writers David Garnett and Francis Birrell. Drawing upon archival material at the Bodleian, Oxford – including catalogues, order histories, correspondence, and financial documents – it deepens and nuances the emerging understanding of modernist bookshops as private enterprises that were also public spaces of intellectual, artistic, and cultural exchange. The first part outlines the bookshop’s links with its Bloomsbury customers and, most notably, the Hogarth Press. The second part then turns to the international custom base and professional networks to show how the bookshop, like the Hogarth Press, challenges narratives of the Bloomsbury group as an insular clique. In considering how friendship and business mixed, the chapter therefore demonstrates two key features of modernist bookshops set out by Huw Osborne in his edited volume The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop (2015), whereby they exist “on the threshold of commerce and culture,” and where they are “locally fixed in cities and towns and yet tied into transatlantic and global networks” that complicate the very division between the local and the global.

In opening his 1941 Rede Lecture, E. M. Forster remarks that to read Virginia Woolf is to be transported to ‘a bewildering world’:

If, later in the lecture, Forster’s analysis of Woolf occasionally attempts to tame her writing – especially in his judgement of her ‘extreme’ and ‘unreasonable’ feminism – his botanical figuration here suggests the radical uprooting of literary conventions. Forster’s revisiting of Woolf’s writing following her death is, as Kelly Sultzbach describes in Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination (2016), ‘an experience that reminds him of organic profusion’ or ‘wild growth’. Indeed, Forster’s lecture might be read as its own experiment in bewilder ment, moving as it does between domestic spaces and wild species in its engagement with Woolf’s oeuvre.

On 31 December 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote what would turn out to be her last letter to her father, Harold Beauchamp, describing her life at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon, France:

As is well known and has become part of her legend, Mansfield had chosen to enter this Institute after trying, without success, numerous medical treatments for her tuberculosis. It was a move ridiculed by several of her contemporaries who thought she was misguidedly turning her back on (Western) medicine in favour of an (Eastern) charlatan, the Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher and philosopher George Gurdjieff. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, for example, respectively judged Mansfield to be in the grip of a ‘psychic shark’ in a ‘retreat for maniacs’, a ‘rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’. Even Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, ‘noisily regretted’ her being taken in by ‘the spiritual quackery of Gurdjieff’. It would be easy to read Mansfield's words to her father, with their reference to the smell of cows as having healing properties, as evidence of her wrong-headed decision. In this vein, her claim that she wanted to write a book called ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ could be dismissed either as a joke or just a silly idea.

When read in full, however, there is little in Mansfield's letter to support the notion that she had lost her senses and given up on her health, while there are also hints that her projected bovine book was more than a passing fancy. She opens with sober commentary on her ‘very tame semi-existence’ at the Institute, with emphasis not on dramatic spiritual revelation but on everyday bodily (dis)comfort: ‘My heart’, she writes, ‘under this new treatment, which is one of graduated efforts and exercise, feels decidedly stronger, and my lungs in consequence feel quieter too.