Review
`Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading of a "modern" woman and her time.' Studies on Women Abstracts
`these are wonderful letters ... excellent editors' Roger Gard, The Spectator
`this volume is admirably assembled ... one is impatient for its sucessors' Christopher Hawtree, The Times
'splendidly edited volume' The Tablet
`wonderful letters ... ... the excellent editors ' Roger Gard, The Spectator
'splendidly edited volume' Isobel English, The Tablet
'This middle volume is remarkably close to a novel. No selected letters could possibly achieve this effect. What we get is a compelling daily record, charting the ups and downs like a fever graph.' Evening Post
'meticulously transcribed, annotated and edited collection of Katherine Mansfield's letters' Rhoda Nathan, Hofstra University, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920
`The editors Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott have made the material very accessible to those not familiar with Katherine Mansfield's life and work with helpful editorial notes, while fragments from her notebooks and recipients' letters provide the necessary context to thse colourful and dramatic letters.' English Studies, vol.78, no.5, September 1997
Product Description
The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial. This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might turn her illness to less negative ends. As she put it, 'One must be ... continually giving and receiving, and shedding and renewing, and examining and trying to place'. For all the grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time.
