Sad Quotes About Friends Biography
source(google.com.pk)
Even before she died at the age of thirty-four Katherine Mansfield had achieved a reputation as one of the most talented writers of the modern short story in English. From 1910 publications in periodicals like the New Age through the five volumes of stories published before her death, Mansfield was recognized as innovative, accessible, and psychologically acute, one of the pioneers of the avant-garde in the creation of the short story. Her language was clear and precise; her emotion and reaction to experience carefully distilled and resonant. Her use of image and symbol were sharp, suggestive, and new without seeming forced or written to some preconceived formula. Her themes were various: the difficulties and ambivalences of families and sexuality, the fragility and vulnerability of relationships, the complexities and insensitivities of the rising middle classes, the social consequences of war, and overwhelmingly the attempt to extract whatever beauty and vitality one can from mundane and increasingly difficult experience.
The growing avant-garde of the second and third decades of the twentieth century admired her unique insight. Virginia Woolf—who alternately disapproved of and envied Mansfield's wider and more amorphous sexual, economic, and social experience and who was both her principal rival and close friend in a shifting, difficult, intense, and communicative relationship—always respected and learned from Mansfield's writing. When she heard that Mansfield had died, Woolf wrote in her diary: "I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of." Mansfield's fiction has been increasingly respected throughout the years, the quality of her thought and writing praised as further stories, journals, scrapbooks, and letters have been posthumously published. Although reminiscences, particularly those of John Middleton Murry, the husband who survived her, have sometimes tended to sanctify her, healthy reactions against sanctity have questioned the reputations of Murry and others; they have questioned not at all Mansfield's fiction or her role as a significant and seminal modernist. The variety and brevity of the fiction, its accessibility as well as its length, have enabled Mansfield to reach an expanding audience throughout the century.
Mansfield was born as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, on 14 October 1888, the third daughter in a commercially and socially expansive family. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, had been born in the gold-prospecting fields of Australia, had immigrated to New Zealand, and had become a noteworthy success in insurance, company directorships, and finally the Bank of New Zealand (he was knighted just a few days before his talented daughter died). Her mother, Annie Burnell Dyer Beauchamp, had also been born in Australia and had immigrated when her father was sent to New Zealand to start a branch of an Australian insurance firm. Both parents were only one generation removed from the English immigrants who still referred to Great Britain as home.
When Kathleen was just one year old her parents went to England, her pregnant mother returning in six months. The child, a fourth daughter, developed infantile cholera and died within three months. A fifth daughter was soon born and then, finally, the son and last child, Leslie (often called Boy), whom everyone idolized. Her birth-order position in the family, her childhood pudginess, and the fact that she wore glasses left Kathleen feeling ignored or neglected, although she was close to her maternal grandmother. This grandparent, with two of her own unmarried daughters, lived with the Beauchamps in increasingly large and comfortable houses, first in Karori, a country district outside the city, and then in the luxurious setting of Tinakori Road, Wellington—the house depicted in one of Katherine Mansfield's best-known stories, ``The Garden Party." In the later stories that deal with Mansfield's childhood in New Zealand, the father is always vigorous and successful, yet emotionally dependent on the devotion of the wife and children around him. The mother is quiet, more tense and socially conventional, sometimes ill, always eager to please her husband but often remote from or indifferent to her daughters.
In 1898 the Beauchamp parents visited England and stayed for a time with Harold's even more successful cousin who had returned from Australia to establish his family in a country house in Kent. The cousin's daughter, May, had just married the German count von Arnim and written Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which reached its twenty-second edition in England by May 1899. Whether or not the Beauchamp parents brought a copy of the book back to New Zealand, family legend dates Kathleen's determination to become a writer from that point. Yet her tales in school
No comments:
Post a Comment