• 1 Scott, ed., the Katherine Mansfield notebooks. All page references to the notebooks are referenced (...)

1In criticism of Katherine Mansfield one commonly finds accounts of her tendency to assume different “masks” or “disguises” as the mood took her (Smith 5, 47). Mansfield was, the critics claim, a “fragmented” creature – a “chameleon” (Smith 129, 47). Unarguably, Mansfield’s diary entries, personal relationships, and transient lifestyle support this viewpoint. And yet, there is an aspect of Mansfield’s personality – substantiated by the considerable body of work she left behind – that seems to have been either overlooked or downplayed by critics but that indicates a less rash, and more consistent and pragmatic side to the ambiguous woman: her lists. Mansfield was a prolific list maker; her notebooks are punctuated with lists: grocery lists, laundry lists, lists of menu items, quotes, pseudonyms, stories she had read, stories she intended to read, confessions, new disciplines, resolutions – the list of lists is extensive and these lists say a lot about Mansfield, the author, and the woman. This desire to order world, self and writing also belies her supposed distance from the bourgeois society of her upbringing – a society in which industriousness and order were paramount, and ideas pertaining to self-improvement abounded – and, specifically, from her father, whose wealth attained through trade she affected to despise. Furthermore, the lists correspond with Mansfield’s determined self-fashioning as an artist. Bent on a professional career as a writer, Mansfield, “just like a squirrel…gathered and gathered” her impressions and experiences of “Life” and recorded them dutifully in her notebooks, to draw from later in her fiction (2:30).1 Alongside more conventional diary entries – the prose experiments and excited passages beloved of the literary critic and biographer – Mansfield’s lists, interspersed throughout her notebooks, provide further insight into the fiction she subsequently produced, and an unexpected way of accessing the contrary and elusive character of the woman herself.

• 2 Harold Beauchamp substantiates this idea that the colonials were civilisers spurred on by progress; (...)
• 3 Diary entry February 1916. All care has been taken to provide dates in as much detail as possible.
• 4 Diary entry 14 February 1916.
• 5 Mansfield mocked the life her parents wanted for her; she called it “The Suitable Appropriate Exist (...)

5Mansfield’s impulse to record every little detail appears to be colonial in nature. Colonial activity is synonymous with collecting, collating, and categorising and just as the first colonials were purposeful in their endeavours – they saw themselves as the civilising force in a country “redeemed from barbarianism by the white man” – so too were later generations, including Mansfield’s (Cowan 308).2 New Zealand colonials were – ideally – orderly, industrious, and enthused by progress, as Harold Beauchamp’s increasing tonnages demonstrate. Mansfield subscribed to this ideology. She sought order in her own life and expressed admiration for those she saw as hardworking. Artist and friend, Edith Bendall, recalls that “[Katherine] liked me [because] I was a worker….I work[ed] all day in my studio” (Tomalin 35). Tomalin writes that, back in New Zealand, after her initial stint in London, Mansfield “worked ...wrote …and read with furious energy” (34). Mansfield, however, felt otherwise: “[my girlhood] was wasted wasted….My college life …might never have contained a book or lecture” (2:30-31).3 She scolds herself throughout her “huge complaining diaries” (2:58) for her perceived weaknesses: “why when my desire is so strong [is] my will …weak” (2:58, 59).4 Mansfield’s closest companion, Ida Baker, remembers Mansfield’s fanaticism for the smallest details – “pushing things a fraction of an inch this way or that” (Moore 126). In spite of the numerous self-interrogations throughout her notebooks, biographer C. K. Stead concludes that Mansfield had “stamina …energy …and determination” (9) – all qualities consistent with the ideal colonial. Tellingly, her habit of making lists embraces both the mundane aspects of her everyday life and the refined engagement with the making of an artist. Mansfield acknowledges this when she writes, “I am a divided being with a bias towards what I want to be” (Berkman 143). The two are perhaps not as divided as the familiar story of Mansfield’s escape from “stifling” colonial insularity into art would suggest (Tomalin 30).5

• 6 Hanson and Gurr discuss the feminist stories that Mansfield produced for the New Age between 1908 a (...)

6In her endeavours to expand her knowledge and develop her writing Mansfield selected “books …for study” and listed these in her notebooks (1:153). She randomly tests her grasp of the important names in English Literature, listing amongst others, Defoe, Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer (1:31-32). “About the old masters” Mansfield writes, “What I feel…is the more one lives with them the better it is for one’s work” (Caffin 24). She did not, however, merely follow the established canon, and Sylvia Berkman feels Mansfield’s efforts were rather haphazard in this respect. Berkman suggests that Mansfield’s reading, though “constant [was] largely desultory”, but that “Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, and the great Russian novelists” remained Mansfield’s mainstays and informed her writing throughout her career (124). However, Berkman’s opinion appears based solely on the literary influences she sees exhibited in Mansfield’s fiction, and does not allow for the reading Mansfield selected to serve other purposes, particularly in terms of self-fashioning an artistic persona. Back in Wellington after her schooling in London, Mansfield read “a clever, splendid book” by feminist writer, Elizabeth Robins, called Come and Find Me, which immediately prompted new considerations and fresh awareness in the young impressionable writer regarding the role of women (Alpers 61).6 Simultaneously, Mansfield realised that Wilde would not be able to provide her with all that she needed in removing the “self-fashioned chains of slavery [that] hamper…women” (ibid.). She thus broadened her reading to encompass not just the canonical books of English literature, but also feminist works, books on modern psychology, and French and German works, including Maupassant and Nietzsche.

• 7 This idea is substantiated in A.R. Orage’s “Tales for Men Only” which ran in serial publication in (...)

7Mansfield had very definite ideas about the artist she aspired to be and she set about creating herself by exploring the different facets of her existence. She was alternately “an exotic in New Zealand” and “the little colonial…in London” (Scholefield 195; Gordon, Undiscovered ix). Her growth as an artist often involved experimenting – adopting masks – much to the vexation of her friends and colleagues, and critics now cite this behaviour as illustrative of Mansfield’s uncertainty regarding her identity (Alpers 58). However, aside from acting as a defence mechanism in a “predatory” modern world,7 as Mansfield’s injunction to Murry suggests – “dont [sic] lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath …” – these masks correspond with Patricia Meyers Spacks’ theories pertaining to adolescent development (Smith 5). Spacks discusses the role-playing that constitutes the journey from adolescence to adulthood: “during those adolescent years one endlessly recreate[s] oneself, trying out in one’s head – sometimes even tentatively in the real world – different possible roles” (4). This is precisely what Mansfield is doing. In particular, the confessional diary entries, so voraciously interpreted by her biographers, which reveal Mansfield’s shifting personae – “true to oneself! Which Self!” – suggest less that she was unsure of herself, and more that she recognised the need to present different sides of herself to different people, just as her father wore different hats in his various roles as chairman, advisor, board member, friend to the Prime Minister, father, and husband (Drinnage 269).

• 8 Katherine Mansfield wrote various stories with particular journals and audiences in mind. “The Woma (...)

8Seen in this light, then, the pseudonyms, which appear listed in her diaries, are closely linked to the various roles Mansfield found it necessary to adopt. They are not indicative of her insecurity or uncertainty over identity, as Alpers and others suggest, but rather a sign of her active engagement in cultivating a complex literary persona. Her musical training made Mansfield more conscious of both the look and sound of different names, and while the various noms de plume are indicative of her mobile personality, the very deliberateness of her experimentation suggests a more stable Mansfield than previous critics have perhaps been inclined to acknowledge. Regarding “Miss Brill”, Mansfield explained to Murry’s brother, Richard, “I chose not only the length of every sentence, but the sound of every sentence….After Id [sic] written it I read it aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her” (Smith 143). Similarly, Mansfield tries out different pen names until she finds the one that fits with her prose, and possibly the publication for which it was intended.8 Furthermore, aside from aesthetic considerations, on a more practical level the pseudonyms demonstrate Mansfield working through the possible selves available to her as a writer; as Scholefield explains, at the time Mansfield was pursuing her literary career, “women authors, few and far between, still wrote under noms de plume – generally masculine – for the old reason that it was considered not quite the done thing for a woman to write at all” (193). Therefore, “Karl Mansfield” (1:177) and “Boris Petrovsky”, two of Mansfield’s masculine pen names, far from denoting sexual ambiguity in the author, show her awareness of the gendered climate of reception at the time (Smith 47).

• 10 Katherine Mansfield to Martha Putman, ? December 1907, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 35-36.

11The above entries, refer to paintings, either at an exhibition, or in a catalogue; they become part of Mansfield’s reservoir, into which she will later delve for “copy” to build her stories.10 Immediately following is a hurriedly scrawled list of mundane items which, presumably, were her essentials for an upcoming trip:

• 11 Probable date: 24 May 1907 (1:84).
• 12 These entries are dated 01 January 1908.

12Mansfield then concludes, “I am full of Ideas, tonight. Now they must, at all costs, germinate….I should like to write something.…Now truly I ought to be able” (1:84).11 Mansfield knew she had “the brain and also the inventive faculty” (Murry 34). She also had “a perfectly frantic desire to write” (ibid. 16). But “What else [was] needed?” (ibid.).12 The aspiring artist determined that it was sheer hard work. She enrolled in typing and book-keeping courses at the local polytechnic and soon after stated, “I’ll sweat my guts out till I bring it off” (Murry 57) – hardly the words of the delicate flower blooming warily in Murry’s and Scholefield’s accounts.

• 13 From email correspondence with Professor Patrick Evans, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New (...)
• 14 Katherine Mansfield to E.J. Brady, 23 September 1907, Letters, vol 1. p. 26.
• 15 The opening passages of “At the Bay” contain textual references to William Blake’s “Innocence and E (...)
• 16 The Kaingaroa Plains and Kaitoki are in the Urewera region – inland of the East Coast of the North (...)

14Mansfield’s tendency to record every minute detail in her thirst for fresh “Copy”, as illustrated in her lists throughout her diaries, reminds Patrick Evans of Janet Frame’s injunction to New Zealand writers to describe and describe and describe.13 Mansfield confessed that she had a “rapacious appetite for everything” and her listing in her notebooks bears testament to this.14 In 1907 while travelling through the Urewera region – the “back blocks” of her native New Zealand (Alpers 62) – Mansfield’s “scribbled impressions” of the people, the landscape, “the smell[s] and sound[s]”, at times read like lists – the details of which then find their way into her fiction (1:135, 137). “The Manuka and sheep country” of her camping trip, “the rivers & willows.…ferns [and] tuis” (1:137), all lend themselves to Mansfield’s Arcadian vision in “At the Bay” thirteen years later: “…from the bush there came the sound of little streams flowing, quickly… gushing into ferny basins….Myriads of birds were singing….Round the corner of Crescent Bay, between the piled up masses of broken rock, a flock of sheep came pattering” (205-207).15 Although, as Elizabeth Caffin points out, Mansfield’s powers of recall were impressive, the lists in her notebooks prompted those memories and Mansfield was prepared to draw from them “until [she] exhaust[ed her] store” (2:32). “…the sea …a silver point etching and a pale sun breaking through pearl clouds.…” (1:135), glimpsed whilst crossing the Kaingaroa Plains, become, in the opening lines of “At the Bay”: “Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist….round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves” (205). And later, “Everywhere on the hills great masses of charred logs – looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts, a yawning crocodile, a headless horse …” (1:136), seen on the journey to Kaitoki, re-emerges in her description of weed-hung rocks “like shaggy beasts come down to the water to drink” (224).16 For Mansfield the New Zealand landscape served as a primary “aesthetic resource” and her lists from the Urewera experience provided valuable material for her late fiction (Orr, De-scribing 166).

• 17 Katherine Mansfield contributed to the New Age off-and-on from 1910-17, to Rhythm, from 1912-13. Th (...)
• 18 In a German Pension, 1911; Bliss and Other Stories, 1920; The Garden Party and Other Stories, 1922.

15Mansfield’s writing, although sporadic due to her fluctuating health, rather than a lack of motivation, was prolific. From her earliest literary success in 1897, with “A Sea Voyage” – awarded first place in her primary school’s writing competition – to her first contributions published in Queen’s College Magazine in 1903; from the numerous journal publications in the New Age, Rhythm, and the Blue Review,17 reviews in Athenaeum, the often garrulous letters, and the fifty-three diaries, not to mention another few hundred loose sheets of paper, and three volumes of work published during her short lifetime,18 Mansfield’s output was immense. This productivity was achieved through continual effort – self-punishing and charged with an awareness of the distance between achievement and possibility – and appears to have closely reflected the concentrated determination of her fellow colonials to improve self and world by steady application. Therefore, despite the scorn she so often directed, particularly in her late teenage years and early twenties, at her compatriots, who were “ultra colonial” she too fitted this description (Gordon, Urewera Notebook 45). Her fascination with the new and unknown, her thirst for experience, the constant describing, and romanticising, and most significantly, her endless listing align her with her fellow colonials – and what is more, she knew it.

• 19 She was, after all, according to her principal, Canon G C Bell at Queen’s College “a little savage (...)

16Bridget Orr suggests that Mansfield first came to the realisation that she was “precisely one of those ‘colonials’ she had so despised in New Zealand” once settled back in London and busy revising the material in her Urewera notebook for her short stories (De-scribing Empire 166). Mansfield, however, fully recognised herself as such well before her return to London. Although in her diary (March 1908) she writes, “I am unlike others” she immediately scolds herself for such fancies: “O Kathleen …do tell the truth more” (Alpers 60). Under the influence of Wilde and the Decadents and in the pursuit of a sybaritic lifestyle, Kathleen merely came across as the “extravagant daughter of a rich colonial” (Alpers 66). Mansfield, Orr believes, was plagued with anxieties pertaining to her colonial status in London,19 perceiving herself a “hybrid” who failed to fit in anywhere (166). Far from lending her an air of exoticism, Sydney Janet Kaplan explains, her “background [which] was tainted with money and trade” meant that she was excluded from “the comfortable world of the academic and artistic establishment”, but also from the “left-wing bourgeoisie” (13, 12). Kaplan’s summation calls to mind Vincent O’Sullivan’s much quoted phrase that Mansfield was destined to feel “discomposed anywhere” (Katherine Mansfield 13). From this perspective Mansfield may very well have seemed “discomposed” yet her absolute unwavering determination to be a writer, and the methodical way in which she went about achieving this while her sisters contented themselves with drawing room parties, demonstrate that underlying pragmatism and constancy which ultimately brought her success in her chosen field.

• 20 Diary entry ? May 1908.
• 21 Katherine Mansfield’s diary entry of 21 June 1918 reinforces her love of the material comforts of h (...)
• 22 Diary entry 10 November 1919.

18Mansfield, writes Stead, had the “energy… and determination” that defines the colonial, forging ahead in a land of “rough roads & glorious mountains & bush” (9; 1:137). Despite the early affinity Mansfield developed for the Decadents and her leaning towards the lifestyle of an aesthete, her lifelong work habits align her with her father and not Wilde. Mansfield took more pleasure in hard work than in leisure. In a diary entry of around 1904, Mansfield’s note to self reads “I must get down to work” (Michel and Dupuis 24); she never ceases to remind herself what it is that she must do and what it is that she needs – namely, “power, wealth and freedom” Tomalin 44).20 She acknowledged that “there [were] no shortcuts” (Gordon, Undiscovered xviii) and her letters, diaries and drafts indicate how powerfully she believed this. Smith writes that Mansfield became increasingly aware of “divisions in the self” upon her return to England in 1908 (27). Although she adopted a bohemian lifestyle, Mansfield could not conquer the ingrained habits of her colonial upbringing, nor was she prepared to forego the bourgeois privileges that, according to Murry, she considered her birthright (Stafford and Williams 146).21 Mansfield was so much the prisoner of the colonial work ethic that she even worked strenuously at being a Wildean sinner. Desiring the life of the decadent aesthete, she dressed in delicate garments and surrounded herself with beautiful colours and materials (Moore 129). She indulged her sexual impulses and smoked incessantly, but she soon confessed, “I cannot burn the candle at one end & write a book with the other” (2:170).22 Her rebellion against the colonial world was itself a ‘colonial’ gesture and her self-making as an artist combines the colonial stress on making anew with the Wildean stress on untrammelled aesthetic fashioning.

• 23 Alpers discusses this in his second biography: “[Mansfield’s] “let’s be friends” approach….is the e (...)
• 24 Alpers draws attention to Katherine Mansfield’s notion of “compartments”; into these compartments, (...)

19Tomalin astutely identifies Mansfield as “a character in whom recklessness and scrupulousness combined in so extraordinary a fashion” (2); Mansfield’s diaries substantiate Tomalin’s claim. In the juxtaposition of quotes from Wilde and Pater with laundry lists and grocery bills, in the satirical sketches of friends and colleagues, and the sentimentalism towards a family she ostensibly despised, and, finally, in the confessions and repentance, Mansfield demonstrates the traits that Tomalin sees as defining her personality. Berkman claims that Mansfield “left the unique imprint of her personality… upon all that she wrote” (115) – a feature of her writing that brought her early criticism; a teacher of Mansfield’s wrote that she “put herself in [her written work] too much” (Boddy 5). Mansfield was, undoubtedly, aware of this problem; her diaries remain confessional, as one would expect, but as she develops as a writer, she distances herself from her subject more and more.23 In a diary entry dated 21 May 1918, Mansfield despairs, “in my hideous modern way … I cant [sic] get into touch with my mind. I am standing gasping …and I cant [sic] ‘get through’” (2:134). Mansfield it seems is suffering temporarily from writer’s block: “[It is] dark and empty & quiet, above all – empty” she writes (ibid.), but what is interesting is the analogy she implicitly draws between her father’s work and her own. She describes trying to get in touch with her mind via a telephone; her mind she then perceives is an “empty building” which she recognises is her “father’s office” (ibid.). The writer’s block, it seems, lasted only hours as the following diary entry contains lists of story ideas and leading sentences, but in the preceding entry, Mansfield, perhaps subconsciously, aligns herself with her father who conducts his business from an office he reaches via “a clumsy wooden goods lift” (ibid.); Mansfield’s mind is her office, replete with “compartments” and “public rooms” (Alpers 30).24

• 25 See Moore, p. 126.

20As “someone who comes from a great way off”, Mansfield was, believes Stead, free of the “established convention[s and] custom[s] of Europe (9). She was not, however, entirely free of those conventions and customs specific to her colonial upbringing – particularly those instilled in her by her father. Although she championed the cause of the Decadents, “balance and proportion” is what Mansfield felt the young colony needed and while her father set about achieving this in his business affairs, Mansfield aimed to realise it in her personal life (Alpers 55). Regarding “Life”, she allowed, “We haven’t the ordering of it” (Smith 124); but Mansfield tried nonetheless. She filled her diaries with lists in an attempt to gain control – power – over circumstances. Mansfield determined “to keep a minute note book – to be published someday” (2:32) – undoubtedly an idea brought to mind when occupied in translating Chekhov’s diaries and letters. “All of this [she professes] I may start at any minute” (ibid.). Her diaries are littered with such convictions: “I shall keep a strict account of all monies” (ibid.), and admonitions: “DISCIPLINE WHICH DO YOU PREFER?” (2:140), and morale boosters: “Now Katherine.…Keep it up” (ibid.). Her physical workspace she kept neat and orderly; Virginia Woolf likened it to a doll’s house, with a place for everything and everything in its place. Ida Baker too remembers Mansfield most for her love of routine, her regimented habits, and her fastidiousness, even in respect to the housekeeping.25 “Do other artists feel as I do – the driving necessity – the crying need – the hounding desire…?” (Murry 47-8).

• 26 These are Katherine Mansfield’s own words.
• 27 Katherine Mansfield’s claim here is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence’s belief that “a man puts everythi (...)
• 28 Katherine Mansfield to Dorothy Brett, ? September 1921 – specifically regarding the recently comple (...)

21Mansfield was unarguably a chameleon; she was determined to “try all sorts of lives”, within her fiction and in real life (Tomalin 30). However, aside from the masks she assumed, her passion for mimicry, and her shifting ideals, first and foremost she was a writer, and it was to this end that her energies were primarily directed with all other matters taking second place, including her most intimate relationships. In the flux of modern life, from Tinakori Road to Harley Street, and from Acacia Road to Fontainebleau, Mansfield sought to “realise …harmony” (O’Sullivan, “Magnetic Chain” 118)26 and one way in which she hoped to do this was by keeping track of the merest details – listing them in her diaries. Berkman concludes that Mansfield’s “journals and [l]etters [provide a] full portrait” of the artist (116); this, however, is hopeful to say the least. They bring the reader “nearer” and one learns that, for all the play-acting and moral transgressions, above all, Mansfield “want[ed] to be real” – “to be good, sincere, simple, honest” (Drinnage 277, Berkman 124). She put “all [her] heart and soul in [to her writing]27 – every single bit….It [was] as good as [she] could do.”28 Such convictions echo the values of the pioneers in colonial New Zealand society. The Mansfield that comes through in the diaries remains as elusive as ever, but there is consistency even in the ambiguity. The purpose of endless lists was twofold; they were a tangible resource to which she could return for copy, and they were a means of grounding herself and achieving the balance she felt essential, though near impossible in modern life. The accounting and listing allowed Mansfield to order her world, self and writing so that she could better concentrate on what was singularly important in her life – her consistent, “gnawing” and yet very practical ambition – “To write books & stories & sketches & poems” and there is nothing ambiguous about that (Murry 53, 47).