Newberry Library Cache Found
“Nearly 30 unknown poems by Katherine Mansfield have been discovered in a U.S. library, giving fresh insight into the writer’s most painful and difficult period, the evidence for which she had later destroyed,” the Guardian reports.
“Gerri Kimber, senior lecturer in English at the University of Northampton and chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society, made the discovery at Chicago’s Newberry Library in May this year. The collection’s significance had remained undetected until now because it was marked with a name similar to the New Zealand-born writer’s previously published poems.”
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New Zealand’s Most Famous Writer.
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Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry.
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“Even before she died at the age of 34, Katherine Mansfield had achieved a reputation as one of the most talented writers of the modern short story in English.”
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“Katherine Mansfield revolutionized the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness – its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.”
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“This doc examines Katherine Mansfield complicated relationships with her family and homeland, her turbulent personal life, her writing (credited with changing the course of the English short story) and her early death in France in 1923, at age 34.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on June 11, 2015