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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
British biographer Tomalin (Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft) here reinterprets the life and career of the great New Zealand-born short story writer and her relationships with family and friends. Writing from a perspective different from that of previous biographers Antony Alpers and Jeffrey Meyers, and allowed to examine letters not available to them, she is less sympathetic than they to John Middleton Murry and more appreciative of D. H. Lawrence's importance to Mansfield. She adds new dimensions to the pictures of Mansfield's connections with her friend Edith Bendall, her "faithful wife" Ida Constance Baker and Virginia Woolf. "None of her sexual relations with men appears to have given her happiness or even satisfaction," and, in her affairs with women, she did "the courting, the letter-writing and the jilting." Tomalin also suggests that Mansfield's many illnesses and perhaps her death, in 1923 at age 34, from TB, were attributable to the gonorrhea she contracted from Floryan Sobieniowski in 1909. Photos.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is a highly readable portrait of the writer whose life and work figure so insistently as a sort of shadow accompaniment to the larger achievements of Lawrence and Woolf. Benefiting from previous Mansfield scholarship, Tomalin looks closely into Mansfields's medical history, finding what she believes to be a crucial exposure to gonorrhea in 1909 as the forerunner and probable cause of the various debilitating ailments that led to her death 13 years later. Without attempting a definitive literary evaluation or biography, Tomalin focuses sharply and sympathetically on the specific personality that defines both the life and the workbrave, bold, secretive, fearful, quixotically volatile, and ultimately possessed by an almost perverse integrity. Earl Rovit, City Coll., CUNY
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
