At Home Among the Russians: The Short Stories of Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield

Summary

Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield emerge from the same coterie that boasts some of the most recognisable names in literary history: Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and Mansfield herself, to name a few. Garnett was friends with Ford from childhood and her brother, Edward, was an editor, advisor, and friend to Ford, Lawrence and Conrad. Through her brother, Garnett became well acquainted with Lawrence and exchanged letters with Conrad, allegedly becoming fictionalised as Natalia Haldin in Conrad's Under Western Eyes. Edward's wife, Constance, on the other hand, corresponded with Mansfield about their competitive translations of Anton Chekhov's works. Despite Edward's pedigree in publishing, writing and editing books, Olive Garnett has not become a familiar name, although her two published works did enjoy a reasonable level of positive attention in the British and American press at the time. Mansfield's oeuvre and name, however, are celebrated and critiqued internationally, with studies of her personality and life commanding as much interest as the analysis of her work. Both Mansfield and Garnett had a common interest in Russia and, writing in the same literary milieu, both wrote short stories about Russia and Russians.

Where the interest in Russia comes from for Garnett and Mansfield forms a substantial part of this essay. Both were influenced by various Russian radicals and philosophers, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who conceivably served to inspire the writing of both women. Mansfield's short stories ‘Tales of a Courtyard’ (1912) and ‘A Dill Pickle’ (1917), and Garnett's ‘The Case of Vetrova’ (1900), ‘Roukoff’ (1900) and ‘A Russian Girl’ (1905), as well as letters and diary entries, will be examined. The context for the essay will stem from the ‘Russomania’ that took hold from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the subsequent fin-de-siècleand post-Great War paranoia within the British national consciousness which expressed itself in the form of prejudice towards the foreign Other. The trajectory from ‘Russomania’ to post-war prejudice and a rise in Russophobia maps a clear link between the start of Garnett's writing career and the end of Mansfield's. The purpose of this article is to incorporate Garnett into the discussion surrounding Mansfield in relation to Russian themes. It will consider the influence Russia, and Russian people, had on the style and work of Mansfield and Garnett, and in turn reveal how both writers present Russia.