(Re)collecting memories of Wellington: Katherine Mansfield’s travels in Europe

As a young student at Queen’s College in Harley Street, Katherine Mansfield once put her hand up in a Bible Class and declared (falsely), that she had been chased by a wild bull. The teacher condescendingly responded, ‘Ah, I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand’. Thus, from the very beginning of her life in Europe, Mansfield, the colonial – who retained her antipodean accent throughout her life – knew what it felt like to be marked out as inferior, to never truly ‘belong’. This paper will report on the perceptions of literary London towards Mansfield during her lifetime. Although frequently associated with the Bloomsbury writers, they perceived her as being a rather common little Antipodean (daughter of the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, father therefore in ‘trade’); in the immortal words of Virginia Woolf in the early days of their friendship, she claimed that Mansfield ‘stank like a civet cat’. She was indeed rather fond of an expensive French perfume called ‘Genêt Fleurie’ but scent was not approved of in the rarefied air of Bloomsbury and Mansfield could not have known that a little spray of perfume would so upset the delicate olfactory balance of her famous literary sparring partner. Mansfield was always aware of the vulnerability of her position in literary London – of being the outsider. This paper will demonstrate how this colonial mindset affected her personal relationships as well as influencing her craft, imbuing her life in London with a sense of impermanence and insecurity which never truly left her. It did not take her long to come to an understanding that the gap between Gordon Square and Tinakori Road was more of a great – and unbridgeable – divide