INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer

Summary

I put all the unfinished MSS I had brought with me here in a row last night and […] reviewed them – & told them that none of them were really good enough – to march into the open (Ugh! No – I cant even in fun use these bloody comparisons. I have a horror of the way this war creeps into writing … oozes in – trickles in.)

In a letter to John Middleton Murry from February 1918, Katherine Mansfield explicitly acknowledges the unintentional influence of the ongoing war on her own rhetorical structures, using the metaphors of creeping, oozing and trickling to describe its pervading effects. Her parenthetical distaste for these ‘bloody comparisons’ admits the disjunction between the situation she is recording (her evaluation of her literary manuscripts) and her descriptive mode. Both her deliberate and unintentional incorporation of military discourse results in a hybridised figurative language in her writing, which can tell us about the effect of the Great War on literary language more generally, as well as on Mansfield in particular.

This special issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies examines, in Kate McLoughlin's succinct phrase, ‘what happens when war and words are brought together’. It addresses Mansfield's engagement with the First World War – the ‘Great War’ – and its impact on her writings. Like the reclamation of women's war writings that we have already seen in relation to Woolf and others, Mansfield's literary response to the key political event of her time – one which postcolonial scholars are still demonstrating was truly global – is key to our understanding of her developing writerly style. It is in her responses to this event that we find a ‘political Mansfield’, commenting on the public events of her time, and the articles in this volume provide us with a greater understanding of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In providing new and different readings of Mansfield's explicit and implicit war stories, these essays refine and extend our understanding of these particular stories and their genealogy, and more broadly illuminate the specific and more general influences of the war on Mansfield's evolving technique. They jointly suggest the importance of the influence of the war on Mansfield's literary language, and simultaneously for Mansfield's own particular brand of modernism.