Glowing with life

A hundred years after her death, Katherine Mansfield’s short stories are still as vivid and immediate as when they were first penned.

-  KIRSTY GUNN

When does a writer first start thinking about writing? Thinking, not about what to write - all those stories or poems or novels and what might happen in them- but, thinking, rather, how to go about it. When does she start thinking, this writer, about the writing itself?

For Katherine Mansfield, the Wellington-born short-story writer, it was early enough: "This style of work absorbs me," she wrote, when still a girl, to an Australian magazine that was publishing vignettes she'd developed from earlier pieces and which already showed her visionary bringing together, in prose, of seeing and sense. Here was someone who knew exactly what words could do, how they could bring life, as it were, to life. No matter what her subject, whether it was a doll's house or an apple, Mansfield wanted to forge the kind of sentence that would transcribe it fully, wondrously to the page as something vital and necessary.

"Do you, too, feel an infinite delight and value in detail," she wrote to her dear friend, the Ukrainian translator Samuel Koteliansky, in 1915,"not for the sake of detail but for the life in the life of it."