Jealousies: Mansfield in Mansfield, and the poetry of C.K. Stead

This paper will consider the character of Katherine Mansfield as portrayed in the novel Mansfield by C.K. Stead (2004), together with the influence of Mansfield on Stead’s poetry. In 1972, Stead was the third recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship at Menton, which enabled him to spend eight months in the South of France, working at the Villa Isola Bella, once the home of Katherine Mansfield. During this visit, Stead took the opportunity of re-reading all the Mansfield primary texts published at that time, which led directly to the publication some years later of his Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection (1977). This immersion in ‘all things Mansfield’ initiated Stead’s fascination with the author, which remains undiminished. Stead set his novel Mansfield during three years from 1915-1918, a fascinating period in Mansfield’s life when she found her true voice as an author, was still in “reasonably good health”, and which was, as he points out, “the time of her most intense engagement with an extraordinary cast of characters on the English literary scene”. It was also the period of the Great War, which would profoundly affect and influence the lives of Mansfield and her contemporaries. Although technically a work of fiction, since imagination and guess work both, inevitably, play a part, nevertheless Stead’s comprehensive knowledge of Mansfield’s life and literary output, together with his uncanny ability to recreate his characters’ points of view, results in a fascinating novel which has a ring of ‘truth’ about it. The paper will also consider various poems by Stead, including ‘Jealousy 1’ and ‘Jealousy 2’, based on episodes in Mansfield’s life, together with a new poem ‘Isola Bella’, which Stead has written especially for this conference