All sunflowers and bamboo: Katherine Mansfield in 1910

The year 1910 was to be critical in Katherine Mansfield’s development as a professional writer. Between February and August 1910, nine of her Bavarian stories were published in the New Age, her first professional publications in England; these stories along with several others were later published in 1911 in her first collection In a German Pension. There were two major exhibitions in London in 1910, both of which would go on to influence Mansfield creatively. The first was the enormous Japanese exhibition held at White City, from 14 May 1910 to 29 October 1910. Mansfield took to wearing a kimono at home, read the poems of Yone Noguchi, and talked about visiting Japan. Noguchi would eventually become a contributor to Rhythm, the magazine Mansfield co-edited with John Middleton Murry in 1912-13 and there would be references to Japan in both her fiction and her personal writing. The second exhibition which Mansfield attended in 1910 was Roger Fry’s ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, which ran from 8 November-14 January 1911 at the Grafton Galleries. It was London’s first real experience of ‘modern art’ and would plant the seed for Mansfield’s experiments in literary impressionism. This paper will therefore discuss these three important events in Mansfield’s life in 1910: the first publications of her stories in England, and her absorption of Japanese and post-impressionist influences into her own subsequent literary creativity