"A Child of the Sun": Katherine Mansfield's spiritual journey

Katherine Mansfield’s last year of life was transformed by the reading of a book entitled Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego, whose Eastern mystic philosophy she wholeheartedly embraced, and which made her all the more determined to seek a spiritual cure for her diseased body, since physical cures had proved worthless. In January 1922, from Switzerland, she wrote in her journal: I have read a good deal of Cosmic Anatomy – understood it far better. Yes, such a book does fascinate me. [...] To get even a glimpse of the relation of things, to follow that relation & find it remains true through the ages enlarges my little mind as nothing else does. (NB2: 313). Vincent O’Sullivan notes that ‘“attract” is far too moderate a word’ for what Mansfield felt towards Cosmic Anatomy. On finishing the book, she wrote to her friend Violet Schiff that ‘she had ‘passed through a state of awful depression [...] But I see my way now, I think. What saved me finally was reading a book called Cosmic Anatomy, and reflecting on it’ This paper will explore Katherine Mansfield’s spiritual development, culminating in her decision to enter Gurdjieff’s ‘Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man’ in Paris in the autumn of 1922: ‘I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be – [...] a child of the sun’ (NB2: 286-7).