Katherine Mansfield enters the Pléiade
Gallimard's prestige collection is publishing the New Zealand-born short-story writer, who died in 1923 at 34, in an edition gathering her published stories alongside posthumous texts, drafts and critical notes.
Katherine Mansfield has joined the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, according to Le Monde, which describes an edition encompassing every story she published in her lifetime together with numerous posthumous texts, scholarly studies and early drafts. The result, the paper notes, allows readers to follow her work day by day, tracing the writer's method across finished stories and the material she left unfinished when she died of tuberculosis in 1923, at 34.
Mansfield, born in Wellington and long associated with the London literary circles of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, built her reputation on short fiction prized for its compression and its sudden, exact turns of feeling. Le Monde frames the Pléiade entry as an occasion to rediscover what it calls her "prose fulgurante."
In a companion interview with Le Monde, Pierre Furlan, a translator and writer specializing in New Zealand literature, discusses what he calls the Mansfield myth, suggesting that the story of her life has come to rival her fiction in the public imagination. The source material does not detail further the content of that conversation.
No publication date, volume count or editor's name for the edition is given in the available material.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.