The Tree of Knowledge: New Insights on Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and ‘A Woman’

Summary

The story of how Katherine Mansfield's journals were eventually disseminated into the public domain is well known. She left some fiftythree notebooks and a mass of loose papers upon her death in the hands of her husband, John Middleton Murry, who first published a selection of material four years later under the title Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927). Because of its success an inevitable sequel followed, entitled The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield (1939), before the publication of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield: Definitive Edition (1954), which incorporated the material from both the 1927 Journal and the 1939 Scrapbook, as well as adding further material not previously published. But this ‘definitive’ edition was still highly selective, and it was not until Margaret Scott's The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition (1997) that the full unexpurgated versions were available to the reading public, and not until Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison edited them as The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield (2016) for the Edinburgh Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, that a critical edition has been available.

In the twelve years between the publication of the Journal and the Scrapbook, however, more material from the journals appeared in the pages of The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1933), co-written by Murry and Ruth Elvish Mantz. Mantz had published her Critical Biography of Katherine Mansfield in 1931, and Murry, needing assistance in transcribing the journals, wrote to Stanford University, where Mantz had graduated and worked as a librarian, to ask for help. An exercise in hagiography, the Life deals with Mansfield's early years up to 1912, and here new material from the notebooks surfaced, either in epigraphs or as substantial interludes. It is one of these substantial interludes that concerns this present essay.

Some time between 1907 and 1908, the young Mansfield noted down memorable quotations from her reading. These entries appear in chapterten of the Life, entitled ‘White Gardenia’. Murry and Mantz give the extract the subtitle ‘Reading Notes 1905–1907’, and preface it as follows:

Kathleen's reading notes […] are filled with passages and epigrams copied from her reading. Wilde predominates, and his maxims were taken and absorbed into her, accepted as ethics, as the gospel of living. She said in those days, ‘I would rather have the highest heights and the lowest depths – anything rather than the placid middle line of life.’