Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies on her heels; but when she died aged only thirty-four she became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin’s biography brings us nearer than we have ever been to this courageous, greatly gifted, haunted and haunting writer.
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
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About the Author
Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. She has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of, among other books: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman and the extraordinarily successful biography of Samuel Pepys. Other books written for Penguin are: Jane Austen: A Life and a collection of memoirs entitled Several Strangers.
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful
By Four Violets
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
Best known as a short story writer, Katherine Mansfield died in 1923 at the tragically early age of 34. Her life was a restless, itinerant one after she left her native New Zealand to attend school in London. Her wanderings never made her happy: nor did her liaisons either with men or women, and she was dogged by ill health. She, like her close friend D H Lawrence, finally succumbed to tuberculosis. Her best work was written in frenzied bursts in the last few years of her life: stories of the alienation between men and women, mothers and children - evocative, perceptive stories bubbling over with life. She objected to Frieda Lawrence pointing out obvious sexual imagery but her own stories use such imagery freely - especially one of her most well-known, "Bliss".
Claire Tomalin succeeds in painting a sympathetic portrait of a woman who many found hard to like in life, and shows us her vulnerable, alone side . When she was in the last throes of her illness, she wrote "One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you and you've only to slip through". And this was the woman who loved life, who wrote "I had a whole spring full of blue-bells one year with Lawrence. I shall never forget it...the shadows raced over the silky grass and the cuckoos sang".
At the end, she realised, and wrote - "I am a writer first". But it was too late, and by then the seeds of destruction were well grown.
A gifted life tragically cut short - whose epitaph could perhaps justly be: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.
Claire Tomalin succeeds in painting a sympathetic portrait of a woman who many found hard to like in life, and shows us her vulnerable, alone side . When she was in the last throes of her illness, she wrote "One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you and you've only to slip through". And this was the woman who loved life, who wrote "I had a whole spring full of blue-bells one year with Lawrence. I shall never forget it...the shadows raced over the silky grass and the cuckoos sang".
At the end, she realised, and wrote - "I am a writer first". But it was too late, and by then the seeds of destruction were well grown.
A gifted life tragically cut short - whose epitaph could perhaps justly be: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
By Kate Hopkins
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Paperback
A wonderful biography of a difficult, brilliant woman who, through a number of tragic circumstances, culminating in a losing battle with tuberculosis, died young, having written many superb (and some not so good!) short stories but without perhaps ever fully realizing her entire potential.
Claire Tomalin's book is a prime example of why biography can be really enjoyable: it's well-paced, full of interesting discussion about Mansfield, her social circle and her writings, both serious and at times wonderfully and darkly comic (I still almost weep with laughter every time I read about Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry's unsuccessful attempts to become a poet and novelist - Tomalin prints a couple of extracts from appalling poems by him!). Tomalin brings the world Mansfield lived in vividly to life, with superb descriptions of London, Paris and the French and English countryside. There are some great character sketches: D.H. Lawrence, for example, leaps off the page, as does his wife Frieda, the French writer Francis Carco, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf and the Greek/Armenian guru George Gurdieff in whose commune Mansfield spent her last weeks before her horribly early death, aged 33. Tomalin also writes well and sensitively about Mansfield's family and her New Zealand background, her early aspirations towards becoming a musician - ditched at the age of 19 in favour of writing - and her various friends, including Ida Baker, a schoolmate in London who virtually became Katherine's servant. She is refreshingly honest about Mansfield's complex character: she could be manipulative, a terrible liar and ruthless in her ambition, but also had a real zest for life and, when not feeling threatened or needing to play a role, a charming and very kind friend.... Read more ›
Claire Tomalin's book is a prime example of why biography can be really enjoyable: it's well-paced, full of interesting discussion about Mansfield, her social circle and her writings, both serious and at times wonderfully and darkly comic (I still almost weep with laughter every time I read about Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry's unsuccessful attempts to become a poet and novelist - Tomalin prints a couple of extracts from appalling poems by him!). Tomalin brings the world Mansfield lived in vividly to life, with superb descriptions of London, Paris and the French and English countryside. There are some great character sketches: D.H. Lawrence, for example, leaps off the page, as does his wife Frieda, the French writer Francis Carco, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf and the Greek/Armenian guru George Gurdieff in whose commune Mansfield spent her last weeks before her horribly early death, aged 33. Tomalin also writes well and sensitively about Mansfield's family and her New Zealand background, her early aspirations towards becoming a musician - ditched at the age of 19 in favour of writing - and her various friends, including Ida Baker, a schoolmate in London who virtually became Katherine's servant. She is refreshingly honest about Mansfield's complex character: she could be manipulative, a terrible liar and ruthless in her ambition, but also had a real zest for life and, when not feeling threatened or needing to play a role, a charming and very kind friend.... Read more ›
By CYNTHIA DEAN
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I always enjoy Claire Tomalin's work, but I don't think much of the subject. She did what she liked, when she liked without really caring for her family or her friends
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful
By popea
Format:Paperback
s always Clate Tomalin's bioghraphies are excellent and I learnt more about Katherine Mansfield which helped me enjoy her short stories in more depth
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