Katherine & Virginia: Friends or Foes?
"Katherine Mansfield has dogged my steps for three years."
English novelist Virginia Woolf’s diary entry of October 1917, about New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield, would leave its reader questioning whether these literary giants, two of the most important modernist writers of the twentieth century, were friends or foes.
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. In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship.1