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which, as Gerri Kimber reveals in an article in the Times Literary Supplement this week, provided the backdrop for an “unpublished and unnamed play by Tennessee Williams”.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

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

“Not ‘Do you remember’, but ‘What if’?”

Short story based on the author Katherine Mansfiel

A note on Huxley's sketches for Leda and the Swan

This article discusses the drawings made by Huxley to illustrate his collection of poems, Leda and the Swan, which I discovered in Texas in 2013

Research in New Zealand at the Alexander Turnbull Library

As the recipient of the 2015 Friends of the Turnbull Research Grant, I was fortunate to spend a month in Wellington, researching at the Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), which houses the world’s largest collection of material pertaining to Katherine Mansfield. I have been fortunate to visit the library before, but it was wonderful to be able to devote an extended period of time on the collection, following up leads and various avenues of enquiry

[Review of] Kathryn Simpson 'Gifts, Market and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf'

Inspired by Lewis Hyde’s groundbreaking study, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1999), Kathryn Simpson in Gifts, Market and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf, takes the notion of the market place and extends it to include gifts and gift economies, at the same time highlighting the homo-erotic importance accorded the gift in Woolf’s oeuvr

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’