Dr Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She is the author or co-editor of over 40 books and has contributed chapters to many other volumes. She has published widely in numerous journals, notably for the Times Literary Supplement and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was President of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–2020). Gerri has made a number of media appearances on national radio and television in both the UK and New Zealand and has been invited as a keynote speaker all over the world. In 2014 she was runner-up for the title of UK New Zealander of the Year for her services to New Zealand culture. Her new biography Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life has just been published by Reaktion Books.
Katherine Mansfield has not been short of biographers since her death in 1923, but this latest biography offers a new focus, where the complicated bond between Mansfield and her husband, John Middleton Murry, is fully revealed for the first time, demonstrating how it was far from the loving relationship superficially portrayed in most of their letters, when Mansfield tended to obscure what she was actually feeling. As time went by, and their literary fame grew, both she and Murry became more acutely aware of posterity and publication – as evidenced in Murry’s bowdlerised early editions of Mansfield’s letters. In addition, there was another complication in their relationship, overlooked by most biographers until now, and that is the covert, long-term bond between Mansfield and the editor of the New Age, A. R. Orage, which, as this biography reveals, truly came to define her life – both artistic and personal – and her death.
In transcribing Mansfield’s letters for the Edinburgh edition, I had already come to a deep-seated understanding of the amount of dissembling in her missives to Murry: outwardly loving, she remained inwardly tormented by the fact that there never was a couple less suited to each other than they were, as Leonard Woolf so astutely recognised. At no point in their relationship did Murry ever truly step up to the mark. But one man nearly always did – Orage. Sadly, Orage famously never kept letters. We only have one from Mansfield to him still in existence, plus the short draft of one more. Nevertheless, my suspicions were confirmed when I made contact with Orage scholar John Wood, who had written extensive notes on the subject but never published them, and who so generously allowed me to make use of his research for this biography.
What we uncovered together was a deep-seated relationship, both sexual and intellectual, which supported Mansfield throughout her adult life, and which left regrets on both sides – especially the realisation that because of their personal circumstances, neither of them were able to fully explore that relationship. But if any proof were needed of Orage’s significance for Mansfield, they need only look to the last year of her life, and especially those precious few weeks spent together at Gurdjieff’s "Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man" in Fontainebleau-Avon. This biography traces that relationship, from its earliest beginnings, through frustrations and outward aloofness, to various rapprochements and covert liaisons, finally wending its complicated and thwarted route to its ultimate conclusion, in a way that has never been revealed before. In uncovering the true extent of Orage’s influence on Mansfield, and not just in 1910–11 as was previously thought, it will be impossible for future biographers to ignore what was possibly the most significant relationship of her entire life.
You can read more about Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography.
The year 1919 marked the beginning of the last four years of Mansfield’s life (though she didn’t know it) – the most successful in terms of her professional career, the most harrowing in terms of her health and the most complex in terms of her relationship with Murry. The sheer number of letters sent attests to the long periods the couple were to spend apart during these last tumultuous years, as the two things Mansfield longed for more than anything (apart from good health) – a stable home life and her man by her side – drifted continually out of reach. Indeed, they were the things she most envied about her literary friend and rival, Virginia. In a letter to Virginia in April 1919 she had written, "A husband, a home, a great many books & a passion for writing – are very nice things to possess all at once." But later that year she would write to Murry, "That's one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together," and ten days later, 2How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write. There is always in her writing a calm freedom of expression as though she were at peace – her roof over her – her own possessions round her – and her man somewhere within call." Just two months later, remembering her utter distress a few weeks previously, she wrote again to Murry: "I used to feel like Virginia but she had Leonard. I had no-one." And it is just this sense of isolation – a lone warrior battling ill-health – together with a complicated, frequently disappointing marriage, that are the overriding features of the remainder of this biography.
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