The Letters Of K Mansfield To John Middleton Murry

Author : Cherry Hankin
Publisher : New Amsterdam Books
ISBN 13 : 146163623X
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (616 download)

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Download or read book Letters Between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray written by Cherry Hankin and published by New Amsterdam Books. This book was released on 1998-05-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The correspondence of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry is a story in its own right, as compelling and poignant as any that Mansfield herself invented. Here, juxtaposed for the first time, are 300 letters exchanged between them during their extraordinary eleven-year relationship. The letters begin in January 1912, a month after their first meeting, when both were relative newcomers to the London literary scene; the last, a letter from Murry, was written four days before Katherine died, in Fontainebleau, in January 1923. The intervening years were ones of both feverish creativity and heartbreaking frustration; of intense closeness and unassailable distance; of shared idealism and, as Katherine's illness took its inexorable hold, of mutual recognition that the glittering partnership they'd once envisaged would be cut tragically short. Whether sparkling or witty, reflective or despairing, the letters have the immediacy of conversation and the candor of the very finest epistolary writing. They illustrate wonderfully the unique personal magnetism which has become part of the Mansfield legend, and indicate, too, that posterity has perhaps judged Murry more harshly than ever she did. As Katherine herself wrote: "I feel no other lovers have walked the earth more joyfully-in spite of all."