Volume 35, Number 4 · March 17, 1988
Going Every Sort of Hog
By Gabriele Annan
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life
by Claire Tomalin
Knopf, 292 pp., $22.95
Katherine Mansfield's contemporaries, including, though reluctantly, Virginia Woolf, agreed that she was brilliant. Woolf admired her besides for going 'every sort of hog,' while she herself remained regretfully respectable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mansfield is that she managed to construct for herself, a century or at least half a century too late, a classically Romantic career. Born in 1888 into a prosperous New Zealand family and educated for three years at Queen's College, Harley Street, an enlightened London girls' school, she rejected her background, comforts and all, to starve in a succession of European attics and unheatable cottages, to combine a hectic love life with dedication to her work, to make it into the literary and artistic avant-garde of her day, and to die, at thirty-four, of a mixture of tuberculosis and gonorrhea. Even Baudelaire could do no more.
Review, 2049 words
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