Jealous of Katherine Mansfield

Georges Banks caricature of Katherine Mansfield (reproduction). Published Rhythm October 1912 Vol 2 No 9.
The portraits reveal different facets of this complex, enigmatic woman, said KMB director Mary Morris. There is a completely new discovery: a watercolour by illustrator A.S.Hartrick of Mansfield playing with a cat, as well as another never exhibited work by Beatrice Campbell showing Mansfield in a London garden with her friend Koteliansky.
The new discovery is Lilac Time and comes from the collection of Beverley and Maurice Allen.
From Te Papa comes possibly the best known image of Mansfield - the one showing her in a red dress by Anne Estelle Rice .
The collaboration between the three institutions, the Alexander Turnbull Library and Te Papa is a first for the KMB and has been a long process said director Mary Morris.
Called Behind the Mask the name is significant because the mask was an image frequently used, not only by Mansfield but by others describing her, says Morris. “Mansfield wrote to John Middleton Murry, (who became her husband), saying ‘don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared underneath – as terrible as you like – but a mask.’”
There is particular interest in one – a biting caricature by the woman Georges Banks who it seems might have seen herself as a competitor with Mansfield for the favours of her friend Middleton Murry. Murry described his first meeting with her….’she was a strange and brilliant woman, .. Her wit, for all its hysteria, was mordant; and her drawings, which she was always tearing up, had a touch of biting imagination, palpable even to me. …’
Mansfield was first published when she was still at Wellington Girls High, in the school magazines of 1898 and 1899. A distinctively New Zealand writer Mansfield forged her reputation in England. She was part of the new era in English writing and at the heart of the intellectual and creative life of the early 20th century and members of the legendary Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf famously wrote about Mansfield: ‘(Hers) is the only writing I have ever been jealous of”
Behind the Mask, Katherine Mansfield Birthplace, 25 Tinakori Rd, Thorndon.









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