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Also Recommended
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Katherine Mansfield, Angela Smith
£7.99
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Shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand book awards 2009, Reference and Anthology section
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield
Volume 5: 1922
Edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott
376 pages
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234x156mm
978-0-19-818399-0
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Hardback
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05 June 2008
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This item is temporarily unavailable. Orders for unavailable items are supplied and charged as soon as the item becomes available.
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- Final volume in a celebrated edition of Katherine Mansfield's letters
The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different - if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived?
Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of
Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She went against what her education, her husband, and most of her friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last months with Russian émigrés and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff disciples (which she was not). But Fontainebleau give her the space and the incentive to shake free from the intellectualism that she thought the malaise of her time, as she worked at kitchen chores, took in the details of farm life, tried to learn Russian, and attempted to reach total honesty with herself. 'If I were allowed one simple cry to God,' she wrote in one of her last letters, that cry would be I want to be
REAL.'
Readership: Those with an interest in twentieth-century literature, modernism, post-colonial literature, and feminism
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Edited by Vincent O'Sullivan, Professor of English, Victoria University, Wellington, and Margaret Scott, Retired, formerly Manuscripts Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington
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"This fifth volume of the Collected Letters brings a satisfying completeness" - Stephen Barkway, Virginia Woolf Bulletin "Its completion is a triumphant achievement... The editors' labours throughout have been meticulous yet unobtrusive" - Trev Broughton, Times Literary Supplement "Top of my wishlist... plangent, wishful and determined even at the end with O'Sullivan's learned and sensitive introduction." - Kirsty Gunn, The Scotsman Books of the Year "...her last year has never appeared as vibrant as in this elegantly produced and unobtrusively edited volume, filled with previously unknown material." - Christopher Hawtree, Telegraph on Saturday "The
editors deserve our gratitude for publishing these letters" - A. Banerjee, English Studies
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Introduction
Textual Note
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations and Manuscript Sources
THE LETTERS
I: Switzerland - Sierre: January 1922
II: France - Paris: January - June 1922
III: Switzerland - Sierre: June - August 1922
IV: England - London: August - September 1922
V: France - Paris and Fontainebleau-Avon: October 1922 - January 1923
Index of Recipients
General Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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