Katherine Mansfield

by Claire Tomalin

  The woman who most demands to be considered in relation to Katherine as friend, rival and semblable was Virginia Stephen, twenty-six in 1908 and so six years her senior. By the time they met in 1916, she was Virginia Woolf, her reputation as a writer attached to the name of her husband; but in 1908 she was still the unmarried, orphaned, shy daughter of Leslie Stephen, the great Victorian man of letters, with no achievements of her own. She had lost not only her mother and father but also a much-loved elder brother and step-sister. To trauma were added two episodes of madness, most recently in 1904. The personality that appears in her letters is a rigorous one; she may be playful, but she is not fluid like Katherine. Where Katherine lets her pen run on, trailing emotion, Virginia's phrases shine like thin ice over dark water.

  Virginia had received less formal education than Katherine – she never went to school – but she had more book knowledge. Her father, every bit as much the patriarch as Harold Beauchamp (and with the same habit of bullying his women over the household accounts), was, at any rate, a scholar-patriarch. Although he never considered sending his clever daughter to a university alongside her brothers, she had the use of his library. Almost through her skin she imbibed the habit of study and took to hard work early; after her mother's death, when Virginia was thirteen, her father taught her himself and arranged for her to have Greek lessons. She struggled with and mastered the grammar, not content simply to pick up the sense of a passage.

  Unlike the pleasure-seeking Beauchamp women, the Stephens considered that service to the community was an obligation. Virginia was not expected to have a career, but for three years, from 1904 to 1907, she gave adult-education classes in history and literature to milkmen and typists at Morley College, London (albeit with rather mixed success). Later she joined the women's suffrage movement and did the dreary work of addressing envelopes and sitting on platforms with the suffragettes.

  Her ambitions were, from the start, purely literary, and she was born into the literary establishment: Henry James and Thomas Hardy were among Leslie Stephen's friends, and his first wife was the daughter of Thackeray. Accordingly, Virginia began to review books early, for the old-established Cornhill magazine and the newly created Times Literary Supplement. She took the work seriously – not being a churchgoer, she often chose to write her reviews on Sunday – and did it very well.

  In 1907, following the marriage of her elder sister Vanessa to Clive Bell, she set up house with her brother Adrian at 29 Fitzroy Square in Bloomsbury. The eighteenth-century Adam houses, once grand, were now shabby offices, lodgings and workshops; the Stephens' was the only one inhabited by a single family. The noise from traffic and working people distracted her, and her conventional relatives thought it a bad address, but she delighted in the freedom. No chaperone, no lady's maid; and in the summer of 1908 she wandered off quite alone to stay in rooms, first in Wells and then Pembrokeshire, in order to concentrate on the novel she was writing. At that time it was called Melymbrosia and was peopled with heroines with Meredithian names, Cynthia, Letitia; the names were changed in later drafts, the traces of Meredith expunged, and the novel finally appeared in 1915 as The Voyage Out.

  Virginia complained that in London she had to contend with

  obscene old women, and young women too with beaks dripping with gore, who advise you to marry. That is my daily penance… ‘I think you should keep a maid Virginia - to do your hair – it makes such a difference – Men notice these things – not of course’ – and so on and so on.3

  Vanessa supported her in defying this sort of advice, and provided other amusements: trips to France and Italy, play-readings in her house, with Virginia taking the parts of Miss Hoyden in Vanbrugh's The Relapse or Rebecca West, the adulterous and suicidal heroine of Ibsen's Rosmers-holm. It was also in Vanessa's drawing-room in the summer of 1908 that a conversation took place between the two sisters and Lytton Strachey which has been described (though possibly with tongue in cheek) as a key moment in the history of British culture.4 Finding the ladies sitting in white dresses under Augustus John's huge painting of Pyramus, and noticing a stain on Vanessa's skirt, Strachey pointed to it and squeaked ‘Semen?’ – thus, according to Virginia, bringing down with one word all the barriers of reticence and reserve that had constrained their conversation until that point. From then on, she claimed later, ‘we discussed copulation with the same excitement that we had discussed the nature of the good’.

  Whether this was really so, or what it meant precisely, is not too clear. Whatever the freedom of her spoken word, her written word remained chaste, and when, in the pages of the New Age in 1910, Edward Carpenter called for relief from ‘the stifling atmosphere of the drawing-room’ in literature and a return to the use of ‘a whole group of words – that group, namely, which represents the coarse, the concrete, the vulgar and the physiological side in human life and passion’,5 his response did not come from Bloomsbury. (It did not come from the New Age's writers either; and when it did, from Lawrence, in the late 1920s, the results were hardly what Carpenter had hoped for.)

  Despite Strachey's boldness, Virginia remained intensely virginal. She had passionate attachments to some older women – Madge Vaughan, Violet Dickinson – but they were chaste, innocent and quasi-filial. She knew she needed calm. Her childhood experiences with a fumbling stepbrother had given her a deep distrust of sex and her precarious mental balance seemed to require the protection which her sister and then her husband (and, indeed, all those who loved her) offered. Despite this difference, both Virginia and Katherine had natures which set them at a definite distance from the established female modes of passivity or resignation.

  Not far from Virginia, but in a distinctly grander part of Bloomsbury, at 44 Bedford Square, another woman at odds with her background and determined to establish her own style of living had also set up house recently. Lady Ottoline Morrell, in appearance wonderful, in character generous, enthusiastic and sometimes absurd, passionately devoted to the idea of the arts and artistic living, used and abused by the many writers and artists to whom she offered copious hospitality, was just embarking, at the age of thirty-five, on her career as a hostess.

  Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck had been born into the most blinkered section of the aristocracy. Her father was in the Army, her half brother left the Army on becoming Duke of Portland, and her other brothers were all in the Army; they spent their spare time in shooting and other field sports, not infrequently in the company of royalty. Ottoline, the only girl, brought up by her widowed mother and governesses, was taught very little beyond riding and dancing – she was not expected to dress herself or brush her own hair – and it was supposed that she would make a suitable marriage to one of her brothers' friends after a Season or two. The fact that she grew to nearly six foot, with a decidedly commanding face, did not prevent her from being considered a good match: she was handsome, impeccably aristocratic and also rich, her allowance in 1900 being £1,500 a year. She was not, however, interested in any of the young men on offer. Her mother, who died when she was twenty, had given her a taste for foreign travel; and her grief at losing her mother inclined her towards religion for a time. After a flirtation with the sixty-nine-year-old Archbishop of York, she decided to tour the Continent with a woman friend, a companion and a maid; her brothers were persuaded to give permission with some difficulty.

  Between 1896 and 1901 she travelled in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, Ruskin in pocket, and also put in a spell of study at the University of St Andrews, where she found logic did not come easily to her, and at Oxford, which she attended as a ‘home student’. Her relations with her family grew gradually more distant; two of her brothers were wounded in the Boer War, one dying of his injuries later. Ottoline fell in love with Axel Munthe, the fashionable Swedish doctor who practised in Italy, but was jilted by him. Another elderly admirer appeared in the shape of the Home Secretary (and future Prime Minister), Asquith; then in 1902 she agreed to marry a young solicitor she had met in Oxford, Philip
Morrell. He seems to have had little in common with her beyond an interest in literature, but he was content to let her be the dominant partner.

  Ottoline found the early years of her marriage unexciting. She relieved the boredom by continuing to flirt with other men, one of them being the same John Cramb who taught Katherine history at Queen's (he fell deeply in love with Ottoline, and later wrote a pseudonymous novel about the episode). Morrell, meanwhile, had been persuaded to take an interest in politics and indeed to campaign for the Liberal Party in Oxfordshire; unlikely as his election in this deeply conservative part of the world seemed, he won a seat in the Liberal landslide in January 1906. In May of the same year Ottoline gave birth to twins. She was a reluctant mother. One twin died; the survivor was cherished but remained her only child, for within a year she decided to have an operation which effectively prevented her from bearing more children.

  She was now free to embark on her chosen life as hostess and patron of the arts, pursuing it with single-minded zeal; and she was extraordinarily successful in capturing the lions she sought. Her Thursday At Homes in Bedford Square were soon famous. Augustus John became her portraitist and her lover and, when he had determinedly disentangled himself from intimacy, remained her friend; through him she met Clive and Vanessa Bell and the whole of Bloomsbury. Virginia, who first met her in 1908, described her as having ‘the head of Medusa; but she is very simple and innocent in spite of it, and worships the arts’;6 and the two became friends.

  A few years later Ottoline embarked on a celebrated and lengthy love-affair with Bertrand Russell; she was flattered by his passionate love, but found his physical demands on her overwhelming, and his arrogance infuriating. When she wanted to be left in peace to read, ‘he told me that I could never accomplish anything important in my life by my reading, while I could help him by being with him’.7 Since Katherine also drew back from an affair with Russell later, it may be that she felt nervous of him for somewhat similar reasons.

  Ottoline shared with Katherine a determined rejection of the values and pursuits of her own family, and an intense wish to set up a life in which the arts, friendships and pleasure should all play their part; both women contrived their personal appearances very consciously to produce a dramatic effect, and both cared deeply for the idea of a beautiful house and garden, the difference between them being that Ottoline could afford to carry out her plans, while Katherine rarely got further than dreams. Both Ottoline and Katherine took a fairly elastic view of their own sexual fidelity, while reacting strongly to ‘betrayal’ by others; both sought to establish ardent intimacies with chosen friends; and both learnt to be suspicious of mockery and malice, two flourishing growths in Bloomsbury, although this did not prevent them from being thoroughly malicious about one another at times.

  Another woman who was to become a close friend to Katherine was the Hon. Dorothy Brett. In 1908 she was twenty-five and preparing to study painting at the Slade School, where she changed her name to an androgynous and classless ‘Brett’. Like Ottoline Morrell, she was in flight from her aristocratic family and their way of life, which she disliked, the more so on account of her lack of qualifications to lead it, for she was very deaf, rather plain and possessed of a certain artistic talent. With slow persistence she made her way out of the circle into which she had been born and arrived in one she found congenial, among artists and writers. Her family continued, like Katherine's, to hand out money when she needed it, enabling her to behave generously towards her new friends such as Mark Gertler, a penniless young East End painter whom she befriended at the Slade, and Dora Carrington, a younger woman painter also in determined flight from her narrow, provincial background. Brett was always more loving than loved. Lawrence later called her a born ‘sister’ and Katherine described her as a ‘clinging vine’, because she attached herself to couples and fell in love with her cultural heroes, who often abused her affection and trust, as they did Ottoline's.

  Brett had a streak of pure silliness, and she made disappointingly little of her gift as a painter, but she did at least contrive to live the life she chose rather than the one laid out for her, and that was in itself a remarkable feat.

  One more woman of importance in Katherine's English life must be mentioned: Frieda Weekley, living quietly in Nottingham in the summer of 1908, in the home of her husband Professor Ernest Weekley, a staid and industrious modern-languages teacher and author of many successful text books, fourteen years her senior. Frieda was twenty-nine and had three small children, born between 1900 and 1904.

  The daughter of an aristocratic and military German family, the von Richthofens, Frieda had grown up in the garrison town of Metz on the French border. The von Richthofens were not rich; the Baron was a hero of the 1870 war, but also a compulsive gambler, and this soured his marriage. Of the three daughters, the eldest was brilliantly clever – one of the first women to attend Heidelberg University – and the youngest a beauty; Frieda, in the middle, was the tomboy, and her convent school education did not eradicate her wild spirits.

  In 1899 she made her surprising marriage. She was intelligent, a good musician and well read in English and German – she produced two small teaching editions of German classics – but she was quickly dissatisfied with her dull life in the Midlands and her dull, good husband, and she had taken to deceiving him. Her most serious love-affair had begun during a visit to her elder sister in Munich in 1907; her lover was a young follower of Freud, Dr Otto Gross. Gross was also a fervent apostle of free love; his relationship with Frieda was thrilling and passionate, but never intended to be binding on either side (and, in any case, both lovers were married). She kept his letters and continued to believe in his ideas for the rest of her life; but for the moment she was simmering in Nottingham.

  These women shared a common determination to escape from the worlds they had been born into, to reject the moral, social and cultural rules inculcated into them in their childhood, however diverse those childhoods were. Each came to love and admire Katherine, and to feel that she had formed a specially intimate bond with her. She must have seemed blessedly fortunate and free, appearing from the far side of the world unfettered by the restrictions they had had to break through. Yet, as we shall see, her initiation into English life was such that she sacrificed this enviable freedom almost before she could seize and exploit it.

  5

  ‘My Wonderful, Splendid Husband’

  Katherine's future lay with these friends; but for the present, as she stepped off the boat-train at the end of August 1908, there was Ida waiting on the dusty platform: Ida, faithful and almost overcome with emotion, with a hansom cab waiting to bear her off to the Baker family flat in Montagu Mansions, to be acclimatized to London again, the familiar and exciting London of Baker Street and Regent Street, the National Gallery and the concert halls – the Aeolian, Queen's, the Bechstein in Wigmore Street – Covent Garden and the Palace Music Hall, the Serpentine for rowing parties, the Vienna Café and the Blenheim Café in Bond Street, the tea shops and flower shops Katherine loved. Ida was officially a music student, a violinist like the Trowell boys; but it was clear to her, and to Katherine, that the first object in Ida's life was friendship.

  ‘You're the only one who believes in me,’1 Katherine had told her before leaving Queen's in 1906; the idea had become something like a sacred trust to Ida, and Katherine, fascinated by this degree of devotion, did not hesitate to avail herself of it. Just how interesting she found Ida's feelings she made clear in the opening chapter of a novel started some years later, in which Ida was shown preparing for the return of her adored friend by addressing her photograph in a whisper, ‘rocking to and fro on heavy unbreaking waves of love’:

  You are perfection… It is my destiny to serve you. I was dead when you found me and without you I am nothing. Let me serve… I am here, waiting. Let me serve… There is only one thing left that has any terror for me… it is that you have grown too strong to need me. You are so terribly strong… I cannot follo
w you on to the heights. Stoop sometimes to me. I know you cannot belong wholly to me – the great world needs you – but I am all yours.2

  In this fragment Ida was given half Edith's name – she is ‘Rhoda Bendall’ – but whereas beautiful Edith had given Katherine quasi-maternal love, plain Ida gave the docile adoration of a subject. It did not thrill but it did intrigue, and Katherine never sought seriously to discourage it.

  Ida went with her to help settle her into her room at Beauchamp Lodge, a very large, square, handsome house in Warwick Crescent, Paddington, overlooking the Grand Union canal basin (and today marooned in the spaghetti of the motorway junction). The existence of such a hostel for young women, and the way in which it was run with the very minimum supervision by the two professional women musicians in charge, were signs of the times. With her own key, Katherine was free to come and go at whatever hours she chose; this was more freedom than she had yet known. The residents, mostly music students dependent on parental handouts, but with a sprinkling of genuine working women, actresses among them, met in the communal dining-room; the rest of the establishment consisted of bed-sitting rooms. Katherine's was on the first floor, with a balcony overlooking the canal, from which she could watch the barges below: the Grand Union was still a working canal.

  Once a month she would have to collect her allowance from her father's banker in the City, Mr Kay. Over half of it – 25s a week – was for her room and meals; but she wasn't always there to take the meals, because Beauchamp Lodge was within easy walking distance of the Trowells in Carlton Hill, and they gave Katherine an enthusiastic welcome as a dear, adoptive daughter, often inviting her to stay for tea, or supper, or even the night. Mrs Trowell must have been lonely in London, and glad of a familiar face from Wellington. She and her husband were quarrelling, and he was not finding it easy to make ends meet. But Katherine still thought of the Trowells as her other, truer family; she called Mrs Trowell ‘little mother’ and enjoyed her company as she baked pies and scolded the servant-girl in the kitchen, or sat darning her sons' socks by the dining-room fire. Sixteen-year-old Dolly, with her pretty face and head of red curls, was ‘little sister’, teasing and affectionate with Katherine as none of her real sisters were. A letter from Vera informed her that at home in Fitzherbert Terrace, ‘We have never been such a happy united family.’ ‘I ought to rejoice, I suppose,’ commented Katherine, bitterly offended.3