Recollections of New Zealand: Katherine Mansfield’s 'recherche du temps perdu’

‘I love this place more and more. One is conscious of it as I used to be conscious of New Zealand. I mean if I went for a walk there & lay down under a pine tree & looked up at the wispy clouds through the branches I came home plus the pine tree – don’t you know? Here it’s just the same’. Thus wrote Katherine Mansfield in October 1920 from a villa in Menton, on the French Riviera. Ill with tuberculosis, the last years of her life involved constant travelling between London and Continental Europe, in search of a climate which would help to alleviate the symptoms of the disease that would kill her in 1923 at the age of 34. Even as a young woman, travelling was a constant in Mansfield’s life. In 1903, when she was 15, her entire family set sail from Wellington, depositing her and her two older sisters in London for three years to complete their education. Youthful sojourns in Paris and Bavaria came with independence from her family, followed by incessant journeying along the Mediterranean Riviera and beyond in search of relief from her tuberculosis. Much of Mansfield's personal writing, from her early teens onwards, can be read as a travelogue of Europe in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Yet what is most noticeable in Mansfield’s journals and letters is how often this European travelling conjured up images of New Zealand. The catalyst of the elemental forces around her – especially proximity to the sea – connected her powerfully with her New Zealand self, which then filtered through into her personal writing and eventually into her fiction. The New Zealand stories, for which she is most famous, thus came about indirectly as a result of her travels, as this paper will demonstrate. New Zealand, initially associated with feelings of anger and repression, would gradually be replaced with a more positive reassessment of her place of birth, with associations of childhood, innocence and security, in direct contrast to her adult nomadic, rootless journeying through Europe