Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives

Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives explores how both the literary, cultural, editorial and biographical influence of French arts and philosophy, and life as an émigré in France shaped Mansfield’s evolution as a key modernist writer, while setting her within the geographies and cultural dynamics of Anglo-French modernism.

Mansfield’s many stays in France were decisive in intellectual, personal and psychological terms: discovering ‘Murry’s Paris’ and the Left Bank; escaping to the War Zone to join Francis Carco; living as a civilian in wartime during the bombardments of Paris; travelling and finding lodgings as a single woman in war-ravaged towns; the experience of bereavement and debilitating ill-health abroad; and the joys and pitfalls for an outsider of a foreign land and idiom.