An introduction to The Horse Whisperer

An introduction to The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Evan

Exciting discovery of previously unknown Katherine Mansfield manuscripts at the Newberry Library

It was whilst working my way through the rich holdings of Katherine Mansfield materials at the Newberry Library in May 2015 that I came across a thick folder of poems. On opening the folder and leafing through the contents, I realized that I had uncovered a large number of previously unknown poems by Mansfield dating from 1909/10, written when she was just 22. This is a period of her life where biographical information is at its most scant, since she systematically destroyed all her personal papers from this difficult youthful period in her life

[Review of] Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey, by Jennifer Walker, Book Guild, Brighton (ISBN 978 1 84624 851 1), 2013, £20; Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Gate, by Isobel Maddison, Ashgate, Farnham (ISBN 978 1 4094 1167 3), 2013, £58.50

Book review of two recent biographies of Elizabeth von Arni

Judas and C.K. Stead: personal Zen in the face of God

Emeritus Professor C.K. Stead, CBE, ONZ, a fifth generation New Zealander, is his country’s most important, influential and internationally acclaimed writer – the author of thirteen collections of poems, two of short stories, eleven novels, and six books of literary criticism. He is, by definition, a postcolonial writer, and almost everything written by him or about him relates, in one way or another, to the concepts of postcolonial literature. As he admits: ‘I am indelibly part of the notion of postcolonial literature and don't even have to think about it or acknowledge it for that to be the case’. In his essay ‘What I Believe’, first published in 1993, Stead wrote: ‘Intellectually I see the human condition as bleak – though it is a bleakness that has a certain tragic glory’. The so-called ‘great mysteries’ of life – infinite time, infinite space, the apparent uniqueness of our world - cannot, for Stead, be explained by religion. In their place, Stead considers man’s sense of beauty as a true mystery and his sense of comedy as a trait ‘which truly distinguishes the human animal’. Stead’s acclaimed and controversial novel, My Name was Judas (2006), takes the above concepts and utilises them in a fictional and revisionist view of the lives of Jesus and Judas. Witty, acerbic, and occasionally moving, Stead’s Judas does not ‘betray’ Jesus – he simply does not believe in his divinity. Now an old man revisiting past memories, and with a clear conscience, Judas shows that his charismatic childhood friend was merely deluded in believing himself to be the Son of God, and that far from having miraculous powers, he was merely carried away by his own eloquence. Jesus as radical revolutionary? Yes. Jesus as Messiah? No. This paper will discuss Stead’s agnosticism - the notion of faith and rational scepticism - and relate it to the above novel’s radical reworking of the Gospels, and, more broadly, to Stead’s life as a write

A fragment of an unknown play by Tennessee Williams

During the First World War Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence shared a catastrophic idyll in Cornwall and London which, as Gerri Kimber reveals in an article in the Times Literary Supplement this week, provided the backdrop for an “unpublished and unnamed play by Tennessee Williams”. In a scene called “Night of the Zeppelin” the friends celebrate a cold Christmas with a charade about Nero fiddling at Rome and speculation on how much the price of a single torpedo would transform their personal finances. Gerri uncovered the piece whilst on a Harry Ransom Research Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin this summer. The full text of the play fragment will be published in volume 7 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, to be published by Edinburgh University Press next year

Words with wings

Speech presented at the Royal Commonwealth Society’s Essay Competition Awards Evening, 19 November 201

Review of Second Violins: New Stories Inspired by Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Marco Sonzogni

Review of Second Violins: New Stories Inspired By Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Marco Sonzogni (Auckland: Random House, 2008, ISBN: 978 1 86941 969 1

Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky, by Claire Davison

Claire Davison’s magisterial new book turns the spotlight on the co-translations with S.S. Koteliansky of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Five chapters interrogate their individual conceptions of translation: their translating voices used as a form of enactment; how angles of perception are rendered, picking up on examples of impersonation and mimicry; how, in the translation process, they also become co-authors; and finally how the role of translating can be viewed within the context of early-twentieth century life-writing, a facet of their work ‘to which all three co-translators were particularly sensitive’