MORE KATHERINE MANSFIELD MANUSCRIPTS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 7, Issue 2, 1 October 1974, Page 18

MORE KATHERINE MANSFIELD MANUSCRIPTS

Margaret Scott

Katherine Mansfield’s oldest sister, Mrs Vera Mackintosh Bell, died on 3 February 1974 in Ottawa, leaving the last of her Mansfield material to the Alexander Turnbull Library. It will be remembered that Mrs Bell donated to the Library in 1968 the very large scrapbook of Mansfieldiana which she had compiled through half a century. What has come to us now, apart from some books and newspapers cuttings, are some interesting and valuable manuscripts.

There are twelve letters from Katherine Mansfield herself, eleven of them to her sister Vera between 1908 and 1922, and one to her father, Harold Beauchamp, which, written in November 1921, is very revealing. In it Katherine attempts to explain to her father why she has been silent for so long. The explanation involves her shock at being told by her cousins in Menton that he grudged the allowance of £3OO a year he was making to her and he felt that her husband ought to be providing for her. The letter ends with a plea to him not to turn away from her. ‘Never for a moment, in my folly and my fear, have I ceased to love you and to honour you.’ Before sending this letter to Vera, Beauchamp wrote on it a note emphatically denying that he had ever grudged anything he had given to any of his daughters. This letter is not among those of which he deposited typed copies in the Turnbull many years ago.

There are two letters from Chaddie to Vera after Katherine’s death and funeral; one from Elizabeth Von Arnim to Katherine; a telegram from Murry to Chaddie informing her of Katherine’s death; a letter from Kay, the Manager of the London Branch of the Bank of New Zealand, to Beauchamp, about Katherine’s ominous physical condition; two from Beauchamp to Vera after Katherine’s death; two from Beauchamp to Kay about financial arrangements for his daughters (from which it is clear that Katherine was the most heavily subsidised of the three of them); one from Antony Alpers to Vera enclosing a typescript copy of A Last Talk With Katherine Mansfield by A. R. Orage, published in The Century, November 1924. Altogether this material comprises an important addition to the Turnbull’s body of Mansfield manuscripts.