Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Gerri Kimber, Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and Series Editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

'This is an impressively wide-ranging exploration of 'the most timely meeting of writers in the history of literature' (Ali Smith) illuminating the unhomed, dislocated 'other rooms' of Woolf's and Mansfield's six-year-long creative dialogue, encompassing obliquely angled portraiture, cities and sisterhood seen sideways, and distancing devices of distaste. 'Other rooms' also open onto unexpected vistas - public gardens, gardens of earthly delights, and cultivated flower beds of philosophy, thereby redimensioning intimacy, food and body politics, animality, stage-masks, and Time itself.'Claire Davison, University Sorbonne-Nouvelle - Paris III

'I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend ... pray consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing, who desires to be scrupulously truthful - and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.'

Katherine Mansfield's ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry, and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship - absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in 'quicksands' - and its profound impact on their creative imaginations.


Christine Froula is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University.
Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in English at the University of Northampton.
Todd Martin is Professor of English at Huntington University.


Cover image: Vanessa Bell, The Other Room, late 1930s. Oil on canvas, 161 x 174 cm. Collection of Bryan Ferry © The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett. Image Credit: Bill Philip Photography.

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ISBN 978-1-4744-3965-7 [PPC]
ISBN 978-1-4744-3966-4 [cover]
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Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction: Thinking Sideways through One's Sisters, Christine Froula; CRITICISM; Powers of Disgust: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Maud Ellmann; Together and Apart, Maria DiBattista; Seated between 'Geniuses': Conrad Aiken's Imaginative and Critical Responses to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Sydney Janet Kaplan; Katherine's Secrets, Christine Froula; A Conversation Set to Flowers: Beyond the Origins of Kew Gardens, Karina Jakubowicz; 'roses blooming under glass; lips cut with a knife': Hermeneutics of the Modern Female Face in Woolf and Mansfield, Halyna Chumak; The Fly and the Displaced Self: Affective Potential in the Epiphanic Moments of Mansfield, Woolf, and Lawrence, Cheryl Hindrichs; Dangerous Reading in Mansfield's Stories and Woolf's 'The Fisherman and His Wife', Brian Richardson; CREATIVE WRITING; Talk; Ali Smith: Getting Virginia Woolf's Goat; Play; Barbara Egel: The Point of 'Slater's Pins': An Introduction; Barbara Egel: Virginia Woolf's 'Moments of Being: "Slater's Pins Have No Points"': A Dramatic Adaptation; Poems; Jackie Jones: 'Katherine Mansfield's Heirlooms'; Maggie Rainey-Smith: 'How too weird'; CRITICAL MISCELLANY; 'Not the kind to die': Katherine Mansfield and the Unquiet Ghost of 'little brother', J. Lawrence Mitchell; REVIEW ESSAY; 'Which of my many [...] hundreds of selves?' Extending Mansfield's Posthumous Literary Reputation, Claire Drewery; Notes on Contributors; Index.