Letters Between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray

Cherry Hankin

• Publisher: New Amsterdam Books
• Year: 1998
• eBook ISBN: 9781461636236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

The correspondence of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry is a story in its own right, as compelling and poignant as any that Mansfield herself invented. Here, juxtaposed for the first time, are 300 letters exchanged between them during their extraordinary eleven-year relationship. The letters begin in January 1912, a month after their first meeting, when both were relative newcomers to the London literary scene; the last, a letter from Murry, was written four days before Katherine died, in Fontainebleau, in January 1923. The intervening years were ones of both feverish creativity and heartbreaking frustration; of intense closeness and unassailable distance; of shared idealism and, as Katherine's illness took its inexorable hold, of mutual recognition that the glittering partnership they'd once envisaged would be cut tragically short.
Whether sparkling or witty, reflective or despairing, the letters have the immediacy of conversation and the candor of the very finest epistolary writing. They illustrate wonderfully the unique personal magnetism which has become part of the Mansfield legend, and indicate, too, that posterity has perhaps judged Murry more harshly than ever she did. As Katherine herself wrote: "I feel no other lovers have walked the earth more joyfully-in spite of all."

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• By the same author
• Introduction
• January 1912 – June 1913
• February 1914
• March – May 1915
• December 1915
• July 1916 – December 1917
• December 1917 – April 1918
• May – June 1918
• September – December 1919
• January – April 1920
• September – December 1920
• January – June 1921
• February 1922
• August 1922 – January 1923
• Index