That Mansfield seems to care so deeply about the lower classes likely stems from her ardent love of Anton Chekov, who wrote many stories about Russian peasants. Mansfield’s luxurious descriptions of the doll’s house towards the beginning of the story were likely influenced by her teenage admiration for Irish poet, playwright, and novelist Oscar Wilde. “The Doll’s House” continues the story of the Burnell family, which Mansfield began to chronicle in “Prelude,” her longest story that recalls her own childhood memories in the New Zealand countryside, and continues in “At the Bay.” Her story “The Garden Party” explores similar themes of class division in a New Zealand village, particularly the coarseness of the wealthy towards the lower classes. Mansfield’s work helpef developed the form of the short story in English literature she is still hailed as a master of precise feeling and psychological depth in her writing. Her husband, editor and critic John Middleton Murry, published many of her stories posthumously in “The Dove’s Nest” (1923) and “Something Childish” (1924). She was most prolific in these final years, writing more than forty stories and several more unfinished works before her early death at the age of 34. She used her childhood memories as fodder for many of her most famous stories, including “Prelude” and “The Garden Party.” In 1917, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent the final years of her life traveling in search of healthier climates and writing prolifically, a desperate attempt to put down all that she had to express before she would eventually succumb to disease. It was only at the death of her younger brother during the war in 1915 that she turned to New Zealand as a source of inspiration for her writing. Mansfield was met with early success, publishing stories in journals such as The New Age, Rhythm, and The Blue Review, while also managing to publish her first collection of short stories In a German Pension in 1911. Once in London, she fell in with a group of other artists and bohemians and began submitting manuscripts to editors. She left New Zealand for good in 1908 to make a name for herself as a writer. She longed to escape the narrowness of her privileged upbringing and return to London, what she considered the center of intellectual and artistic life. On returning to New Zealand in 1906, she found life in a small colonial town stifling and unpleasant.
Much of her childhood was spent in the small, country village of Karori, where she was educated in a village school alongside the children of housekeepers, milkmen, and other lower-class children, just like the Burnell sisters in “The Doll’s House.” At fourteen, she was sent to England to continue her education, studying at Queen’s Collage, Harley Street.
Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Beauchamp in New Zealand to a prominent English family in New Zealand.
0 kommentar(er)
