25 Jul 2012 09:46:14
A lost short story by Katherine Mansfield has been discovered in an archive by a PhD student, giving new insight into one of the most turbulent periods of her short life, when she was abandoned by her lover while pregnant and went on to marry a man she left on her wedding night.
Chris Mourant, a student at Kings College in London, was digging through the archives of the literary monthly ADAM when he stumbled across a host of previously unknown material by Mansfield, including three children's stories, an autobiographical tale and a collection of aphorisms. He contacted Dr Gerri Kimber, a Mansfield expert who is set to publish the first complete collection of the author's fiction this autumn, and she pounced on his findings.
"At first I was slightly sceptical – I thought they would be stories we already had in the collection, as we've stories which haven't been seen in 100 years," she said. "But it only took me a minute to realise that we didn't have any of them. It's hugely exciting."
The most significant find, said Kimber, is the 1909 story "A Little Episode", which tells of a disillusioned society wife's affair with a handsome musician, Pierre, and her subsequent rejection. Only a few scraps from the story had previously been seen. Taking as its epigram a line from The Picture of Dorian Gray – "The one charm of the past is that it is past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen" – Mansfield writes of how Yvonne returns home from a tryst with a bloodied lip, and of how she lies in bed waiting for the husband for whom she feels "intolerable disgust". Pierre, though, is writing a letter dismissing their affair. "She bores me – she has the inevitable feminine passion for trying to relight fires that have long since been ashes."
It mirrors a difficult episode in Mansfield's own life: she fell in love with the musician Garnet Trowell, who abandoned her while she was pregnant. She then married the music teacher George Bowden, but left him the same day, going back to Trowell. When he found out about her marriage, he threw her out again, and the baby was later stillborn.
"She came back to London, doubly rejected by Garnet Trowell, and at that point she wrote the story … It's does have significant biographical implications," said Kimber. "She seems to be describing George Bowden the music teacher, and her disgust at him and at the marriage. Then there's the bitter end of the story [and] the implication of what a fool she was to ever think she could reclaim Garnet. It contains her angst, her bitterness, at the double rejection, all the horror of what she was going through, undoubtedly still pregnant and fearful."
Kimber is including the four extra stories as an appendix to The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, which will be published in October by Edinburgh University Press. An unpublished collection of aphorisms by the author, Bites from the Apple, also discovered by Mourant, will be included in a later volume of non-fiction. The PhD student also found a cache of rare photographs in the archive, including one of Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murry, and one of a man Kimber believes to be Garnet.
