Six tributes to the writer Katherine Mansfield

A hundred years after Katherine Mansfield died at the age of 34, six writers and performers share their personal connections to the New Zealand writer's life and legacy.

A hundred years after Katherine Mansfield died at the age of 34, six writers and performers share their personal connections to the New Zealand writer's life and legacy.

Listen to Miranda Harcourt, Stephanie Johnson, Karl Stead, Charlotte Yates. Paula Morris and Redmer Yska speaking at a 2023 Auckland Writers Festival event

2023 marks the centenary year of Katherine Mansfield's too-soon demise from pulmonary tuberculosis.

In New Zealand and across the world, Mansfield is still cherished for her role in shaping modernism and her experimental, genre-defying body of work.

Some literary critics have called her the best short-story stylist of all time.

Stephanie Johnson says:

"Somehow it was planted in my head, as well as the heads of many of my generation, that Katherine Mansfield was an icon up there with Edmund Hillary and Kiri Te Kanawa. A hairstyle later popularised by Mary Quant had already been rocked by KM. The punk desire to die at 30 had already been achieved by KM who almost managed it at 35. The ubiquitous idea that in order to achieve anything you had to leave dull, restrictive New Zealand and never come back was pioneered by KM in 1908. "

Phrases entered our lexicon by osmosis: 'I seen the little lamp!' from The Doll's House being the most well-known, closely followed by 'Risk, risk anything. Care no more for the opinions of others for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth!'

"In the 1980s, like many others, I was further drawn towards Katherine Mansfield the woman, through Cathy Downes's brilliant play The Case of Katherine Mansfield which she performed over a thousand times in six different countries. I suspect others, much later in 2011, were drawn to her by Fiona Samuel's timeless and evocative film Bliss."

"By the time I started to write seriously (and miraculously to be performed or published), I still felt no real connection with Katherine Mansfield. She had left. I had stayed. She had a father who funded her departure and life thereafter. I had a father who loved me, but didn't love the things that I did, and expected me to make my own way in the world."

"It was in Menton that I read, cover to cover, her collected stories. It wasn't until then that I felt closer to her, less envious of her opportunities, and more admiring of her writing."

About the speakers

Miranda Harcourt…

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