This story is from Your Weekend and Stuff

A bright waspish mate talking to you. Brave, original, uncompromising. Unstoppable. There are many ways to describe Katherine Mansfield, but a century after her death, perhaps the most important is relevant, as Bess Manson discovers. 

On January 9 Nicola Saker’s phone started pinging.

The president of the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society got a Google alert every time the writer was mentioned in publications around the world on this date, the 100th anniversary of her death.

Ping ping ping. Saker’s mobile went wild.

Articles were appearing in the Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, the New York Times, all writing about Mansfield as a modernist writer a decade ahead of her male contemporaries - the likes of James Joyce, TS Eliot.

“She was experimenting with form in a way that nobody else was at the time. She was on her own,” says Saker, rather gratified by the interest in arguably one of our most famous literary talents.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp drew her last rattling breaths on January, 9, 1923, in Fontainebleau-Avon, finally consumed by the tuberculosis that had ravaged her lungs for years. She was just 34.

A hundred years later Mansfield-mania is in full swing. 

From community amateur films (think Sir Ashley Bloomfield dressed as Stanley Burnell in an At The Bay tribute) to international symposiums, her work is being scrutinised and celebrated to the nth degree.

The passing decades have not diminished Mansfield's appeal, Saker insists.

“She feels incredibly contemporary. Reading her is not like reading someone from 100 years ago. She has an incredible gift of immediacy. She is like a bright waspish mate talking to you.”

She’s as relevant today as she ever was, she says.

“She had same-sex relationships. She was open to looking at different ways of being and living in ways that people think they are doing for the first time today.”

But her real legacy is her ability to inspire other creatives, Saker says, pointing to the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Woman of Words, a biographical dance work choreographed by Loughlan Prior celebrating the life of Mansfield, which includes a rare female pas de deux; a 2020 album of artists who wrote and recorded settings of Katherine Mansfield's poetry, and Beauty Incarnate, an installation by George Watson (Ngāti Porou, Moriori, Ngāti Mutunga), at Wellington City Gallery.

Artists have used Mansfield as a creative springboard for their own work, says Saker, “and that’s an incredible legacy.”

It’s not only painters and writers who continue to be inspired by her life, says Cherie Jacobson, director of Katherine Mansfield House & Garden. 

One Australian fan who had visited Mansfield’s family home on Tinakori Rd, now a writer’s museum, said the writer’s risk-taking attitude to life had given him the courage to come out to his family.

“People still find all sorts of connections to her life and writing,” she says.

If you're a fan, you won’t have to look far to find Mansfield’s work being celebrated this year.

In October the International Katherine Mansfield Society will hold a symposium in France based on her life and work.

Her books have been republished and new ones by British author Clare Hanson and New Zealand historian and biographer Redmer Yska have hit the shelves. 

Katherine Mansfield House & Garden busted out a campaign to promote Mansfield as an author as relevant today as she was more than a century ago. Their 100 years of influence campaign hit social media with a thwack. Glamorous back-of-the-bus posters featuring poet laureate Chris Tse touted Mansfield as an author who was still groundbreaking; billboards in the city, installations at the airport, all heralding Mansfield as a writer of importance in 2023.

Anyone who hadn’t heard of Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp will be the wiser now.

She’s never been short of devotees. Take biographer and memorist Redmer Yska, whose book Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station was published earlier this year.

“Unstoppable.” That’s how he describes her. “Her unstoppability makes her appealing and relevant. She seems to speak to the moment.

“The qualities of strength, the tenacity, this luminous quality she had about her…You pick up her works and they just glow. They get their hooks into you.  

“She was someone dealing with a disability towards the end of her life… she had this incredible willingness to face the challenges and overcome them, to turn it around. Hers is a story of courage and resoluteness.”

Her work endures. Her stories are universal, they are transcendent, he says.

“She talks about a wet windy beach in Eastbourne, but it could be anywhere in the world.

“Reading At The Bay - it’s very sea weedy, you can smell the sea somehow. I mean, how do you manage that?”

Devotees don’t come more faithful than Bernard Bosque, the official guardian of Mansfield's grave in Fontainebleau-Avon, 35km south-east of Paris. 

He has been taking care of it for around a decade.

“We in Avon have the luck and the great honour to host the final resting place of a world-renowned writer, and therefore a duty of remembrance,” he writes from France. 

“It seems very sweet to keep alive the memory of a person as delicate as they are luminescent.”

Bosque is a fan alright. His lectures on Mansfield, sometimes delivered while dressed Edwardian-style, attract interest from international academics, tourists and teachers of English from the local lycées.

For decades he has organised tours, local in Fontainebleau-Avon and further afield to places she worked and lived and convalesced - Menton, Bandol, Crans-Montana and Sierre in Switzerland.

He points out every single Mansfield detail - a cafe where she sat, the letterbox in which she posted her myriad correspondence.

Every year Bosque organises a commemoration at her graveside around the date of her death with speeches and readings, usually a bit of music. Local municipal and cultural officials, loyal fans of the writer, and sometimes a representative of the New Zealand Embassy in Paris come to pay their respects.

“Bernard is the guy who makes everything happen,” says Helen Peacock-Chiarotto, a New Zealander who has lived in this northern part of France for 36 years.

“He is the one who has kept Mansfield’s memory alive here. He is a man obsessed.”

There’s usually a decent crowd at Mansfield’s graveside gatherings, she says.

“The residents of Avon seem very proud to have an official link with an illustrious literary figure, as they often feel they are looked down upon by sophisticated, bourgeois Fontainebleau next door. 

“As a feminist, I’m really thrilled that young French women today are inspired by her struggles and success in the previously male-dominated world of publishing. I believe they see her as brave, original, uncompromising, determined and fierce, therefore highly relevant even today.”

Fifty New Zealand writers have worked with the ghost of KM at their side in Menton through the Katherine Mansfield fellowship.

Witi Ihimaera, the 1993 recipient, was a 15 year-old at Te Karaka District High School when he read one of her short stories for the first time. It was The Fly. He hated it.

“I thought it was a terrible story. I thought what’s this man doing to this poor fly? He keeps on dropping ink on it… he wants to see if it will rise and live again.”

In fact, the story was about the futility of war, about Mansfield’s brother Leslie who died in WWI, says Ihimaera (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki).

“But at 15 I didn’t think much of it as a short story. It didn’t have any aroha in it. It didn’t have any sense of understanding of a natural environment and relationship between human beings and the animal world, which was what I was after because, after all, I came from a Māori background. 

“It was a fairly alien text for a young Māori boy to read.”

It wasn’t until he read Prelude that he saw why she was regarded so highly as a modernist, he says.

“Her fascination for us as New Zealanders lies in the fact that she is one of the modernists. She belongs to an international level of achievement.”

Even those not taken with Mansfield could not deny her reputation as part of the Bloomsbury Set and the major writers of letters of her time, he says.

“Every writer in New Zealand has got to at some time confront Katherine Mansfield and who she represents because she certainly is in the whakapapa of our literature.”

She remains relevant, he says. The way she gets into people’s minds, the way she writes about them internally, rather than externally.

“… There are very few who can engage in the thoughts of people to such a degree that it’s not only intimate but also a dissection. 

“That sharp penetration of character means that we are forced to go into the layers of meaning that each of them has to offer.”

Novelist and short story writer Charlotte Grimshaw, announced this week as the 51st Katherine Mansfield fellow, encountered the writer early in life. Her own short story, The Olive Grove, is a child’s-eye view of being in Menton where she lived with her family while her father CK Stead had the fellowship in 1972. She started school in the picturesque town on the Côte d'Azur where Mansfield had lived and worked during her illness.

Grimshaw first read Mansfield as a teenager but it wasn’t until her 20s that she got an appreciation of how “terrific” she is.

“I think it’s the vividness of the prose. It’s all in the writing. It’s in the striking clarity of the sentences.

“She endures because she is just really good and the prose is really beautiful.

“She’s like Chekhov. She has a tone that is striking and original.

Her personality is in the writing, she says.

“She was courageous, irreverent. She had a strong sense of humour. She was a really engaging character. There was a mocking intelligence.

“The way that she travelled, the life that she lived - she was a person of courage.

“She was a person of great suffering because she was ill for a lot of the time. So there’s darkness as well. Into the writing went all of that - the humour, the strong character, the courage, the suffering, the intelligence, the sharpness and clarity.”

Yet more praise for the “waspish mate”.

Saker had better brace herself for a few more pings.

Translation assistance from Emily Brooks and Cathy Gamba.