A Note on Some Unidentified Sources in Mansfield's Reading from 1907

Summary

In my earlier article on Katherine Mansfield's notebooks in this volume, I examine in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from a 1907 notebook and discuss the importance to Mansfield of the hitherto unknown source, the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author. In so doing, I call into question the critical heritage on Mansfield's use of the signatures ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I will also discuss a number of other entries from the same notebook. All of these entries have remained previously unidentified and all are drawn from her reading of popular contemporary fiction.

The first is one of Mansfield's well-known lines: ‘Happy people are never brilliant. It implies friction’ (p. 33). This phrase is signed ‘K.M.’, and distinguished Mansfield scholars such as Claire Tomalin and Sydney Janet Kaplan have taken it at face value, reading the aphorism as her own. In fact, however, it comes from Henry Seton Merriman, writing under the pseudonym Hugh Stowell Scott, in From One Generation to Another (1892). Speaking of the character of Dora, the narrator comments: ‘At times she was brilliant; which her father noticed with grave approval, ignorant or heedless of the fact that brilliancy means friction. Happy people are not brilliant.’ Mansfield credited Merriman for the entry immediately preceding this one in her notebook, another quotation from this same novel to which Mansfield added her voice in underlining a word in Merriman's original: ‘It is only men who can hear of death without thinking of mourning and the blinds’ (p. 33). That this quotation was attributed to Merriman but not the other is interesting – it could suggest that Mansfield considered the latter to be so much her own that she laid claim to it. Of course, who wrote the passage originally is perhaps something of a moot point, since the important thing is that the phrase is noted down at all and what that tells us about Mansfield.

Nor is this the only example in the notebooks of her attaching her initials to someone else's ideas; for instance, she quotes (without quotation marks) Arthur Symons's phrase that Oscar Wilde was ‘a philosopher in masquerade’ (p. 99). However, the fact that she found herself drawn to these Merriman passages suggests that scholars of Mansfield's early years may profit from reading From One Generation to Another in seeking to understand her development during 1907.