Mansfield infused her writing with the swelling, potent truth of each instant, committed to utterly by her characters, even if that truth swivelled to face the other way seconds later.

She writes about outsiders, though they don’t always know their status. Reginald Peacock is practically an outsider to humanity, but he has no sense of that: everything is his wife’s fault. Perhaps he seems an outsider because—paradoxically—of the focus on his inner life, how he is separated from the world but indisputably of it, making his way through sensation and experience. Mansfield’s characters are outsiders in other ways, too—outside safety, outside knowledge, often possessed of only half the picture.

 

The problem of sex features in Mansfield’s stories, as do kindness, betrayal, strange alliances. And they’re funny. The humour is absurd and often sharp. It brings to mind a phrase by another New Zealand writer, Damien Wilkins: ‘just the right amount of cruelty’. Death is here as well, and makes the humming of detail more intense. There’s never nothing but its threat is there, quite matter-of-fact, in the dead man in ‘The Garden Party’, the grandson of heartbreaking Ma Parker, a photograph of a boy in uniform. We are defenceless against that magnet: we put things up to protect ourselves, like the boss in ‘The Fly’ with his ‘New carpet...’ ‘New Furniture...’ ‘Electric heating!’—but it’s futile.

Mansfield’s brother was killed in France in 1915; she knew the possibility of her own premature death when the first spot on her lung was diagnosed, two years later. She’d come from privilege but her adult life was hard, and she and John Middleton Murry endured relocations and bankruptcy and the loss of their literary journal and much worse. She knew the perilous line she made her characters walk and was tough on herself, dissatisfied with her work. It sounds bloody awful a lot of the time, but also like a teen fantasy of an artist’s life—impoverished, striving, short—and this is why I feel ambivalent about the fascination with her biography, even as I share it. The thrilling recent discovery of unpublished stories was greeted with special excitement about their autobiographical value.

Mansfield’s vivid journals and letters, though never intended for our eyes, have appeared in different incarnations, presenting various selves. You could fill a book with things other people said about Mansfield and be no closer to knowing her. Virginia Woolf’s diary provides two poles: admiration (‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’) and contempt (‘stinks like a...civet cat’). No prizes for guessing which observation she made when Mansfield was alive and which one after her death.

Mansfield was described, both during her life and after, as having a mask. But who hasn’t? We can’t fully know the inner selves of others except in the deep illusion of fiction, and writing like Mansfield’s is one of the best ways we have of entering what her compatriot Janet Frame called ‘that room behind the eyes’. Her funny, satirical, transcendent stories show us other people. They take us into those rooms where we can forget ourselves. We feel what the characters feel, even as we smile, raise an eyebrow or share a sense of grief with the narrator behind their backs.

She can give objects, too, the sense that they are coming into light. Light is significant in Mansfield’s stories, whether the dusky, obscuring glow of poor Bertha’s living room, or the sunbeam that comes and goes from the daughters of the late Colonel, or the famous doll house’s ‘little lamp’. The lights of modernism are being made, illuminating the world, as Joyce described: ‘Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.’

Things stand in for feelings—they hold feelings, are feelings. Mansfield is brilliant at the objective correlative, hats or leaves or chairs that exist as props not because we’re on a stage but because we’re in a dream when we’re reading. Hers is an intense realism that knows reality and fantasy are inseparable:

Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling—how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again...

Even without the compelling biographical details, in the act of disappearing inside her characters Mansfield hides in plain sight. It’s her sensibility that creates and attends to these many different lives, her innovative, astonishing manipulation of free indirect discourse and point of view that lets us in on those transitions in her characters.