‘To Hell with the Blooms Berries’: Katherine Mansfield in Mansfield and the poetry of C.K. Stead

This paper will consider the character of Katherine Mansfield as portrayed in the novel Mansfield by C.K. Stead (2004), together with her influence on Stead’s poetry. In 1972, Stead was the third recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship at Menton, which enabled him to spend eight months in the South of France, working at the Villa Isola Bella, once the home of Mansfield. During this visit, Stead took the opportunity of re-reading all of the Mansfield primary texts published at that time, which led directly to the publication some years later of his Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection (1977). This immersion in ‘all things Mansfield’ initiated Stead’s fascination with KM, which would ultimately lead to the writing of Mansfield. Stead set Mansfield during three years from 1915-1918, a fascinating period in Mansfield’s life when she found her true voice as an author, was still in “reasonably good health”, and which was, as he points out, was “the time of her most intense engagement with an extraordinary cast of characters on the English literary scene”, including the Lawrences and the Bloomsbury group. It was also the period of the Great War, which would profoundly affect and influence the lives of Mansfield and her contemporaries. The paper will also consider two poems by Stead, ‘Jealousy 1’ and ‘Jealousy 2’, based on two real life incidents between Mansfield, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, and Virginia Woolf