Katherine Mansfield

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 1

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 2

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 3

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 4

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 5

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 6

A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield

Short Stories Audio BBC

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HER LIFE

Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, in Kaori, near Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. There are two main islands in New Zealand, the North Island where the capital is and another important city, Auckland, and the South Island, with Christchurch as the most populated city there. But, at that moment, all the New Zealander cities were almost villages.
Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was an Australian who had made his living with business related to gold mines. Then he immigrated to New Zealand and, little by little, achieved a very important position in society and became a magnate of finances, and even he was made a knight for his services to the British Empire.

Katherine had two older sisters and a younger sister and a younger brother. Their parents give them some education and encouraged them to play the piano, to learn how to paint, to read, etc.

You have to remember that New Zealand was the first country in the world where women had the right to vote, in 1893.

At 14, Katherine Mansfield fell in love with a neighbour, Arnold Trowell, a cellist, and from that moment she decided she wanted to be a musician.

When she was 15, her father decided to send his three older girls to London to study at Queen’s College, a very liberal school in Bloomsbury, a neighbourhood in London. Bloomsbury was also the name of a group of intellectuals with a great influence in arts and science.

There she starts her long-life friendship with Ida Baker. It was a singular relationship because Ida (whom Katherine Mansfield called her “wife”) was (perhaps) her lover, her loyal friend but also her slave. Ida Baker wrote a book about Katherine Mansfield with the title Katherine Mansfield, The Memoirs of L.M., being L.M. Lesley Moore, a male name that Katherine Mansfield gave her.

She was at Queen’s College for 3 years; then she had to go back to New Zealand, but she couldn’t stand the provincial life of her native country and, in the end, she convinced her father to allow her to travel again to the UK and stay there with an annual allowance. She was 20.

She accommodated in a student hostel with a lot of freedom.

There she got in contact again with Arnold Trowell, but she fell in love with his brother Garnet, a violinist. She got pregnant, but we don’t know if he knew it. And then, all of a sudden, she got married to George Bowden, a singing teacher 10 years her senior. Nobody knows for sure the reasons of this marriage. The wedding was a surrealistic affair: she wore black, Ida was their only witness, and she left her husband the wedding night without consuming the marriage. George didn’t want to give her the divorce for six years.

She left the idea of being a musician and bet on being a writer.

Her mother knew about all the affair and travelled to London to take her daughter to a small spa in Bavaria. But they quarrelled, and she disinherited her forever, left her there and went back to New Zealand.

In this spa, Katherine Mansfield had a miscarriage. Her stay in Germany was the ground of her book In a German Pension.

She became briefly involved with a Polish translator, Floryan Sobieniowsky, who infected her with gonorrhoea; that was possibly the cause of her bad health during all her life, her rheumatism, her infertility, surely of her tuberculosis and her premature death. But, thanks to Floryan, she knew Chekhov. A story of hers, The-Child-Who-Was-Tired, a version of a Chekov’s short story (Sleep), almost a plagiarism, was published in 1910 in the magazine The New Age and marks the introduction of this Russian writer to the English critics and readers.

She went back to London, and since then, she moved house restlessly, mostly due to shortness of money.

She published In a German Pension, and she met John Murry, an undergraduate from Oxford, editor of Rhythm, who was going to be her partner, lover and husband in a very troublesome relationship. Their relationship began when she accommodated him in her flat and asked him to make her his mistress. Katherine then worked in his magazine writing book reviews.

Murry and Katherine met D. H. Lawrence and his lover Frieda, and went to live together in Cornwall in a kind of commune; but the society only lasted six months. The characters Gerald and Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love are the portraits of Murry and Katherine.

In 1914 the Great War started, and in 1915 her brother Leslie, her favourite in her family, died in an army training.

She met people from the Bloomsbury Group. Leonard Bloom published her Prelude, and she had affairs with members of the group. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf was of admiration and jealousy.

At 29, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she didn’t want to go to a sanatorium. She went to live in the South of France, where a lot of English people with the same illness tried to recover their health.

These last years of her life were her most productive in literature. She published Bliss in 1918 and The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922.

From the South of France she went to Paris looking for a cure with a famous bacteriologist, and then to Fontainebleau, where a Russian exile (George Gurdjieff) ruled an alternative community that tried to live nearer the nature.

She died from a massive haemorrhage in January 1923.
The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish but Very Natural, her letters and diaries were published posthumously by her husband John Murry.

A Painful Case, by James Joyce

James Joyce at the Wikipedia
A Painful Case at the Wikipedia

Audiobook

Analysis and summaries:

ginevra lee

Complutense

Knapp

Cliffsnotes

 

JAMES JOYCE, by Glòria Torner

James Joyce is one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.

 

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.

He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.

He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.

He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.

Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.

Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.

In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916 he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.

Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemachus) the same hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost every other literary technique to present his characters.

Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.

Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

SOME FACTS ABOUT JOYCE

He was the eldest of ten brothers and sisters.

His family were very poor, but his father had some airs. He didn’t belong to the working classes, he had “business”, and in all of them he failed. He was not a hard-working man, but he wanted some education for James: after a lot of pleading, he got a seat for him in a well-known and high reputation Jesuit School.

Joyce studied languages at the University and, after that, he went to Paris to try to study medicine, but he spent his days there reading in libraries.

When he was 22, he met Nora Barnacle, and, in the second date, she masturbated him, and they started being together for the rest of their lives.

The next year, they ran away from Dublin and went to live abroad forever. They lived in Trieste, Rome, Zurich and Paris. At the beginning he worked as an English teacher, and in a bank translating letters from Italian to English. But then he asked money to institutions to write his masterpiece, Ulysses. He got it from sponsors and from the British government. He didn’t earn anything from his books.

Although we can imagine him as a bohemian artist, he was not any of it because he was essentially a family man. He worked doing English classes (for instance, he taught English to Italo Svevo) to provide for his family, and, apart from this, he wrote following his artistic call.

He had a lot of health problems with his eyes, and there were some periods when he was almost blind. But he continued writing all his life. His wife was a bit illiterate and she only read one of his books, the collection of poems Chamber Music. She asked him to write more commercial books.

He died at the age of 59 of a sudden illness.

WORKS

James Joyce is known for his experimental novel Ulysses. In this novel, Joyce tells us about one day in the life of a very ordinary man. It’s a thick book and hard to read, but it has a lot of radical fans. Before this, he wrote some poetry (but he wasn’t very happy with it), some short stories under the title of Dubliners (following Ibsenian ideas and style), a novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (a Bildungsroman), and another experimental novel, more extreme than Ulysses, under the title of Finnegan's Wake.

In Dubliners, Joyce tried to make a portrait of Dublin’s moral personality, and he arranged its stories according to the ages of a person (childhood, youth, maturity, old age). He had a lot of difficulties to publish it because a lot of real people and real places appeared in the book, and he didn’t want to change anything to hide real names under fictious names. They are “classical” texts, very different from his most famous works. The last story, “The Dead”, has been made in a film directed by John Huston.

A PAINFUL CASE

According to one letter to his brother, this story was one of the worst of the collection, but then it’s a story with two books studying only it.

It is a short story belonging to the group of “maturity”. It narrates the voluntary loneliness of a self-made single man and the involuntary one of a married woman. The man is very proud of being alone, because this way he can spend his free time on his intellectual and lofty hobbies. He meets a married woman, but he doesn’t want an affair, he only wants a listener. When the woman tries to make some advances, he breaks up the relationship because he thinks that between a man and a woman friendship is impossible. Afterwards, the woman has a depression and dies in an accident in a railway station, and he feels (and not only knows) his loneliness.

The form of the story is a classical one: first introduces the characters, then there is a conflict and a solution for this conflict, and last of all, a moral reflexion.

 

 

QUESTIONS

Can you describe in your own words Mr Duffy (that in Gaelic means “black” or “dark”)? Age, personality, physical appearance, job, interests…

From the description of his lodgings, what can deduce about Mr Duffy’s personality?

Why do you think that the Maynooth Catechism is “sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook?

What do you know about Hauptmann’s Michael Krammer?

And about Nietzsche?

Mr Duffy eats arrowroot cookies because they are healthy. Do you think eating healthily can make a person better? What is your opinion about “you are what you eat”?

Mr Duffy thought that he could be a rebel sometimes and rob a bank. Was this only a bluff, or was it for real?

Describe Mrs Sinico in your words

Mrs Sinico is pictured as having an intelligent face. Do you think that the face can be the mirror of a person’s personality or qualities?

What do you know about astrakhan?

How did Mr Duffy and Mrs Sinico come to know each other?

What kind of friendship did they have? What did they usually do in their dates? Was there any love between them?

What was Mrs Sinico’s role for her husband? And for Mr Duffy?

What city is Leghorn? Do you know other cities with names very different from the native language?

Can you explain why he liked Mozart, according to your opinion?

What do you know about the Irish Socialist Party? What were Mr Duffy political ideals?

Talk about Mrs Sinico’s family.

“Every bond is a bond of sorrow”. What does it mean? Do you think it’s true?

“Friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse”: what is your opinion about this?

How did Mrs Sinico die?

How did the breaking up of her relationship with Mr Duffy affect her?

How did Mrs Sinico’s death affect Mr Duffy? Did he hate her, or did he pity her?

Can you explain the metaphor of the “worm with a fiery head” and the end of the story? (page 9 line 1)

Is it possible to compare this story with Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or The Lady with the Dog? What do they have in common? What differences are there between them?

 VOCABULARY

mean, shallow, double desk, alcove, Bile Beans, saturnine, tawny, hazel, arrowroot, bill of fare, roaming, thinly (peopled), house, plying, garret, timorous, wages, phrasemonger, impresario, propped, haze, buff, reefer overcoat, inquest, league, threadbare, hobbling, shop, gaunt, withheld, gnawed