Sally takes time off from trying to unblock her sink to conduct a creative writing lesson with her student, Evelyn. They discuss a single sentence in a short story written by Katherine Mansfield, the modernist writer who died 100 years ago this month. After Evelyn leaves, Sally settles down to read Mansfield’s diaries, immersing herself in her scribblings both funny and profound.

Further Reading:

Katherine Mansfield was a writer, essayist and journalist who primarily wrote short stories and poems which explored existential anxiety and issues of sexuality and class.

She was born in New Zealand in 1888, travelling to Britain aged 19 with the initial intention of becoming a professional musician. She became a well-known figure in bohemian London, befriending members of the Bloomsbury Group, publishing short stories in literary magazines and hanging around with writers such as DH Lawrence. She became a close friend and rival of Virgina Woolf; Woolf said of her, “I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Some critics consider Mansfield to have been a major influence on Woolf’s work.

Like Woolf, Mansfield suffered from ill-health. She was left devastated by the death of her brother Leslie Beauchamp in France in 1915, killed by a faulty hand grenade.  She wrote in her diary: “Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright, and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is”.

She died aged 34 of pulmonary tuberculosis, with much of her work unpublished. Two volumes of her short stories (The Dove's Nest in 1923, and Something Childish in 1924); a volume of poems; The Aloe; Novels and Novelists; and collections of her letters and journals were all published posthumously. The story Sally and Evelyn discuss, The Garden Party, was published in 1922.

Jacob’s Room is a novel published by Virginia Woolf in 1922, the same year Mansfield published The Garden Party and the year before Mansfield’s death. It tells the story of Jacob who, like Woolf’s brother-in-law and Katherine Mansfield’s brother, was killed in the First World War. In a radically experimental form, Jacob’s story is told almost entirely through the recollections of those who knew him. Jacob keeps an old sheep skull in his room, a classic memento mori symbol.

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, is one of the most famous novels in the English language. Published in instalments in 1871 and 1872, it was written by Mary Anne Evans under the pseudonym George Eliot. Although Virginia Woolf described it as "the magnificent book that, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”, she was one of its few fans at the time; the novel was little read and was underappreciated until at least the middle of the 20th century.

The book follows the stories of a vast canvas of characters in a town and surrounding villages, with at least four main plots and many other narrative strands, which intertwine to create a complex whole, which often confounds the reader’s first reactions. The American fiction writer Michael Gorra has written of Middlemarch: “If you really read this novel, you will learn about yourself; if you listen to her, if you let her sentences penetrate, you will find out things about yourself that you didn’t and maybe don’t even want to know. Each page is a lesson in how to be honest with yourself.”

The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com

The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding.

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