Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield – serie

A new authoritative edition of Katherine Mansfield’s complete correspondenceProvides accurate transcriptions that shed new light on the everyday, intimate world of Mansfield as a letter-writerOrganised A-Z, which foregrounds the lives and personalities of her correspondents, along with the various self-fictionalising games that the letter-writer playedShowcases letters and sections of letters that have never previously been publishedProvides meticulous explanatory notes and rich contextual informationOffers extensive attention to the cultural and socio-political context of the correspondenceFrom Conrad Aiken to Hugh Jones, this first volume covers correspondents from every period of Mansfield’s life. A detailed introduction, together with biographical portraits for each correspondent, enhance the cultural and socio-historical context, while the letters themselves offer a detailed exposé of Mansfield’s life: from exile and emigration, intimacy and betrayal, and the traumas of war and disease, to nature and the environment and fashions and food. The volume also reveals the intimacies of some of Mansfield’s most prized friendships.

The first volume of this edition of Katherine Mansfield’s letters, correspondents A–J, is heavily weighted towards the Beauchamp family and several of her closest friends. This second volume, quite by chance, puts the emphasis far more on Mansfield’s literary and intellectual friendships especially members of the Bloomsbury group. It includes letters to Sylvia Lynd, the Hon. Bertrand Russell, Sydney and Violet Schiff, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf and Hugh Walpole, as well as those individuals who gathered around Lady Ottoline Morrell (herself the recipient of one of the largest number of letters in this volume) at Garsington Manor. With over twenty new letters not published in previous editions of her letters, as well substantial revisions and additions to a number of other letters, accompanied by thoroughly researched annotations, this volume offers many new insights into Mansfield’s epistolary relationships.

Volume 3 of the new authoritative edition of Katherine Mansfield's complete correspondenceProvides accurate transcriptions that shed new light on the everyday, intimate world of Mansfield as a letter-writerPresents all Mansfield's letters to John Middleton Murry from 1912 to 1918, foregrounding their years of intellectual apprenticeship and the impact of war, political upheavals and ill-health on their social and cultural environmentProvides meticulous explanatory notes and rich contextual informationOffers extensive attention to the cultural and socio-political context of the correspondenceUnlike the first two volumes of this new edition of Katherine Mansfield's letters, which encompassed a dazzling variety of correspondents, this third volume focuses exclusively on letters to John Middleton Murry, chronologically arranged, from the day when he first became her lodger in 1912 through to the week after the Armistice in November 1918, when they were newly married. It is no exaggeration to say that over the course of these six years, their entire world was turned upside down. By the time the volume closes, they are married but already increasingly estranged; they have both become professional writers but grapple with increasing economic precarity; Europe lies ravaged by war; and the devastating diagnosis of tuberculosis has been pronounced, not, ironically, for Murry whose fragile health had preoccupied them for two years, but for Mansfield herself. This volume of letters documents the whole spectrum of changes, against a vivid historical and socio-cultural backcloth and contains entirely new, insightful and extensive annotations. A second volume of letters between the pair completes the edition.