I came across All Sorts of Lives, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything, via Brona's review of Claire Tomlin's biography — both books published to coincide with the anniversary of the death of New Zealand's best-known author Katherine Mansfield in 1923.

I had already read a Kathleen Jones' wonderful biography Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller (2010), not to mention C.K. Stead's novelisation Mansfield, (2004), but I do like a literary analysis of an author's writing, as long as it's not so scholarly that I feel out of my depth. Or that I have to Make An Effort instead of just enjoying myself.

Well, I did have to Make a Bit of An Effort with Harman's book, because although I've read Mansfield's collections and her novella...

• In a German Pension (1911),


• The Garden Party (1922), and


• The Aloe (published posthumously in 1930),

... I hadn't read all the short stories that Harman explores and so I had to engage in the pleasurable task of finding them online and reading them.

Chapter One starts with How Pearl Button was Kidnapped (1912), and here it is — online at the Katherine Mansfield Society's site — if you want to read it too. It was first published under a nom-de-plume in the avant-garde monthly Rhythm which was edited by her husband-to-be John Middleton Murry but soon became a joint venture between them. Apparently, as well as editing, KM wrote quite a bit for this journal: poems, fiction and book reviews but these were not always under her name because they didn't want Rhythm to have 'too much' of her work in it.

Harman says that Pearl Button wasn't identified as one of KM's until it was included in a posthumous collection. (Unless I missed it, Harman doesn't say which one. It's in my 2007 Penguin Classics Collected Stories, which was first published by Constable in 1945, maybe that one?) It's not long — only about 1000 words —and it's a story which would seem less disquieting without that word 'kidnapped' in its title. Pearl, playing in her front garden, is beguiled into joining a couple of women who take her for a long walk, and then a ride in a cart down to the sea which she has never seen before. She has a lovely time. She is cuddled, and carried, and fed treats. Nobody gets cross when she spills food on her clothes, and she is made a fuss of because her new 'dark' friends are enchanted by her blonde curls. She is never frightened at all, and it is not until a crowd of little blue men arrive to take her back where she belongs, that the reader is made aware that there's been a hue-and-cry over her disappearance and that the little blue men knew exactly where to find her. As Harman says, the story relies heavily on withholding all sorts of information...

The location is exotic but not specified; the protagonist is guileless yet unreliable; the plot develops but isn't in any ordinary sense resolved. We are told the story entirely from the point of view of Pearl, a child of about three years old, who has been left to look after herself while her mother is busy working. (p.18)

Harman notes that this is an early work, of an unsubtle kind of simplicity and has the air of an experiment, or fragment of something bigger.

But the cleverness of the story, and the thing that Mansfield learned to exploit more effectively later, is in the manipulation of the point of view. In 'Pearl Button' she is using what is (now) called 'free indirect discourse' or a 'close third person' voice, that is, writing as if the narrator is passing on a character's experiences and thoughts, but not judging them. Or not appearing to judge them, for of course there's always space between the author and the narrator in which to plant doubts and ironies; that's what the space is for. (p.19)

The reader's doubt about Pearl's delightful day arises because of that word in the title.

From there, Harman goes on to explore the biographical origins of the themes of Otherness, belonging and an awakening sensuality that permeate Mansfield's fiction.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/06/15/all-sorts-of-lives-2023-by-claire-harman/

PS: Alas, I didn’t get to finish this absorbing book because there are eight reserves on it at the library and they won’t let me renew it. When the enthusiasm dies down, I’ll borrow it again. ( )