Kimber, G. (2015) Leslie Beauchamp and Katherine Mansfield: a sibling affair. Invited Keynote presented to: Katherine Mansfield, Leslie Beauchamp and World War One, Messines, Belgium, 26-27 September 2015. (Unpublished)
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Abstract:
Katherine Mansfield’s most poignant personal association with the war concerned the death of her brother Leslie, who was killed by a faulty hand grenade during a military training exercise on 6 October 1915, at Ploegsteert Wood, near Armentières, on the Franco-Belgian border. Not long afterwards she wrote in her diary: “Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright, and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is”. Haunted by his death until her own in 1923, she would write to Ottoline Morrell in November 1918: “I keep seeing all these horrors, bathing in them again and again (God knows I don’t want to) and then my mind fills with the wretched little picture I have of my brother’s grave. What is the meaning of it all?” As Lyn Bicker affirms, this “private event of her brother’s death affected her view and understanding of the public domain of war”. For Mansfield, the war altered everything. Having killed not only her brother, the deaths of many of her friends and acquaintances, including Frederick Goodyear and Rupert Brooke, left her profoundly affected.
Subjects:
Creators:
Kimber, G.
Faculties, Divisions and Institutes:
Date:
26 September 2015
Date Type:
Publication
Event Title:
Katherine Mansfield, Leslie Beauchamp and World War One
Event Dates:
26-27 September 2015
Event Location:
Messines, Belgium
Event Type:
Conference
Language:
English
Status:
Unpublished
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