Description:
New essays and creative explorations of the friendship, milieu and writings of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
'I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend ... pray consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing, who desires to be scrupulously truthful - and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.'
Katherine Mansfield's ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship - absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in 'quicksands' - and its profound impact on their creative imaginations.
Brief description: Christine Froula is a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University, a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. She has published widely on interdisciplinary modernism, feminist theory, and genetic criticism, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (Columbia UP, 2007).
Review Quotes: This is an impressively wide-ranging exploration of 'the most timely meeting of writers in the history of literature' (Ali Smith) illuminating the unhomed, dislocated 'other rooms' of Woolf's and Mansfield's six-year-long creative dialogue, encompassing obliquely angled portraiture, cities and sisterhood seen sideways, and distancing devices of distaste. 'Other rooms' also open onto unexpected vistas - public gardens, gardens of earthly delights, and cultivated flower beds of philosophy, thereby redimensioning intimacy, food and body politics, animality, stage-masks, and Time itself.-- "Claire Davison, University Sorbonne-Nouvelle - Paris III"