The chronology format seems a particularly pertinent way of documenting Katherine Mansfield's life. The New Zealand short story writer is known today both for her work and for the social circle she moved within at the height of what we now know as the Modernist movement in literature. The chronology details how she met Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley and James Joyce, amongst others.
Beginning in 1888 with the birth of Katherine Mansfield and closing with her death aged only 34 in 1923, the chronology traces how the short stories and the perhaps less known poems, evolve and are interwoven with the social fabric of the literary and intellectual culture that surrounded Mansfield's short life. Her ill health also becomes painfully apparent and the limitations this imposed on her ability to write. The first part of the life is described under the heading Early Years (1888‐1905) and is documented in four pages. From 1906 onwards more details are known about Mansfield's life and each year is introduced with a brief paragraph summarising key literary and historical events that took place during that year. This provides a context to the domestic, emotional and literary details of Mansfield's life.
There is an implication lurking behind the title “a chronology” that this will be a fairly dry document of “factual” aspects of Mansfield's life. “Factual”, of course, also includes the emotional connections and relationships that constitute a life and the wax and wane of the various networks and friendships that constituted the Bloomsbury and Garsington sets are documented here.
One of the highlights of this chronology is the depth of cross‐referencing. As though acknowledging that the social circle in which Mansfield moved is as equally likely to be the reason the reader has picked up this volume as is an interest in her writing, almost half of the book is dedicated to A Who's Who in the Mansfield Chronology (pp. 93‐129). Here a short biography of the important figures in Mansfield's life is given, with an emphasis on their significance to Mansfield. This is cross‐referenced with the second part of the index, People where these figures as well as others are indexed. The first part of the index focuses on Mansfield's publications, and is further broken down into genre and the newspapers/periodicals where her work appears. The third part of the index separates out Places – dividing this into the three main geographical aspects of Mansfield's life: New Zealand and Australia, The British Isles, and Europe (and beyond). A seven‐page bibliography precedes the index, a family tree and short Introduction to Mansfield's life and works precedes the chronology.
This is an indispensable addition to Mansfield scholarship, bringing Mansfield's life into the foreground amongst the very illustrious, arguably more widely known, writers she knew. Essential for any university library supporting undergraduate or postgraduate study of literary Modernism.
