Letters Between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
The correspondence of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry is a story in its own right, as compelling and poignant as any that Mansfield herself invented. Here, juxtaposed for the first time, are 300 letters exchanged between them during their extraordinary eleven-year relationship. The letters begin in January 1912, a month after their first meeting, when both were relative newcomers to the London literary scene; the last, a letter from Murry, was written four days before Katherine died, in Fontainebleau, in January 1923. The intervening years were ones of both feverish creativity and heartbreaking frustration; of intense closeness and unassailable distance; of shared idealism and, as Katherine's illness took its inexorable hold, of mutual recognition that the glittering partnership they'd once envisaged would be cut tragically short.
Whether sparkling or witty, reflective or despairing, the letters have the immediacy of conversation and the candor of the very finest epistolary writing. They illustrate wonderfully the unique personal magnetism which has become part of the Mansfield legend, and indicate, too, that posterity has perhaps judged Murry more harshly than ever she did. As Katherine herself wrote: "I feel no other lovers have walked the earth more joyfully-in spite of all."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The New Zealand-born writer Mansfield (1888-1923) and her husband, Murry, the English editor and literary critic, exchanged hundreds of passionate, probing letters during their tempestuous 11-year relationship. Their correspondence reveals Mansfield's fiercely independent spirit, as well as her intense need for understanding from Murry from the time she met him at the home of a friend in London in 1912 until a few days before her death from tuberculosis in 1923. ``I'm a writer first,'' she tells him. ``You are dearer than anyone in the world to me--but more than anything else--more even than talking or laughing or being happy I want to write.'' Their letters also show that Murry was capable of more love than Mansfield gave him credit for, even during their periods of separation. The last missives find Mansfield at the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau; there she received hopeful letters from Murry about being reunited. This illuminating volume, collated by the editor of The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield , provides a fascinating glimpse into the characters of two people who strove to lead lives free of convention and restraint.