Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Disgust disgusts, and its obscenities rub off on the investigator. Think of the hellfire sermon in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a diatribe that glories in disgust as well as in the jouissance of terrorising schoolboys.

both writers show a queasy, even anorexic attitude to eating, their nausea exacerbated by the sight and sound of other masticating jaws.1

Mansfield’s In a German Pension (1911), which contains some of her most disgusted and disgusting stories, is generally dismissed as juvenilia.

While Mansfield and Woolf have often been applauded or disparaged for their lyricism, depending on literary fashion, their fascination with the loathsome has received less critical attention

the one hand Mansfield is too distant – ‘someone apart, entirely self-centred’, feline, alien, ‘inscrutable’ (VWD2, p. 44; 1, p. 257) – but on the other hand too close for comfort, with a stink that gets up her rival’s nose.

Woolf admitted: ‘I was jealous of [Mansfield’s] writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of’ (VWD2, p. 227).

‘We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a – well civet cat that had taken to street walking’ (VWD1, p. 58).

Mansfield and Woolf depict characters who look up from the book to misread their surrounding worlds, misapply allusions or draw wrong, sometimes damaging parallels.

I close with Mansfield’s posthumous influence on The Waves through her Journal and her afterimage in Woolf’s – and perhaps Bell’s – dreams and creative imagination.

My essay, ‘Katherine’s Secrets’, explores things Mansfield knew that Woolf evidently didn’t, notwithstanding Mansfield’s offer of ‘the keys to the city’ and Woolf’s joy in their conversation: Mansfield’s November 1919 letters attacking Bloomsbury and expounding the ‘secret’ of her art;