A KATHERINE MANSFIELD FIRST?

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1 October 1971, Page 103

A KATHERINE MANSFIELD FIRST?

Maude E. Morris

The Lonesome Child

In The Dominion, Wellington, on page 6 of the issue of Saturday, 6 June 1908, there is a poem written by Kathleen Beauchamp, later Katherine Mansfield, called ‘The Lonesome Child’. This poem appears in Poems by Katherine Mansfield, published by Constable and Co Ltd, London, in 1923, and in later editions, with this note: The child verses at the end of the volume were written when Katherine Mansfield was still at Queen’s College, Harley Street, London. They were saved from destruction by one of her friends. Her verse, ‘Why Love is Blind’ was published in The New Zealand Free Lance on 20 June 1908. In July 1908, ‘Study: The Death of a Rose’ was published in The Triad, a New Zealand critical magazine edited by C. N. Baeyertz. Except for two childish stories that appeared in the Wellington Girls’ High School Magazine, The Reporter, in 1898 and 1899, these are the two earliest items to have been listed as works by Katherine Mansfield published in New Zealand. Thus ‘The Lonesome Child’, published 6 June 1908, may be her first work to appear in a public journal in New Zealand. This particular publication has never been included in any list of Katherine Mansfield’s works.

Since it was printed in the Society News Column of The Dominion, with the descriptions of parties, several of which were being given for Kathleen Beauchamp before her departure from New Zealand for England in July 1908, it is likely that it was produced at a party, as later in the month was her prize-winning verse, ‘Why Love is Blind’, which also appeared in the Society column. A curious coincidence is that Katherine Mansfield’s first publication in England in The Daily Mail, 3 November 1909, was in the Table Talk column.

About the time this note by Mrs Morris was being sent to the printer a staff member, Mr P. L. Barton, noticed in the New Zealand Times of ii December 1913, a Katherine Mansfield sketch ‘Old Tar’, (a Karori story). The story, reprinted from the London newspaper, the Westminster Gazette of 25 October 1913, clearly centres around a local character who builds a long planned house to the great interest of the inhabitants of Karori and ‘Wadesville’. It seems to have escaped any comprehensive KM collection.