(Photo: Stephen A’Court for Katherine Mansfield House & Garden exhibition) Katherine Mansfield’s signature coloured stockings. They called her “Katherine”, or, sometimes – with no hint of embarrassment – “Kathy”. They occasionally showed up wearing her signature coloured stockings. They spoke enthusiastically in tutorials about aspects of her life that weren’t particularly relevant to the stories we were examining. She was someone they identified with, someone they felt they knew intimately. Something about the course’s title and its focus on writerly social networks licensed a particular attitude to the figure who tied the course content together.įor several of the young women in the class, Katherine Mansfield was clearly not just an often-overlooked innovator of literary modernist form. Entitled “Mansfield and Friends”, it looked at the works of New Zealand’s most famous modernist export alongside those of writers she’d been influenced by and those she’d known personally: Oscar Wilde, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, D. Nearly two decades ago, I took an English Honours course at Victoria University that is still taught today.

Hannah August finds an accessible and art-first approach in Claire Harman’s new biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything.

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