Pierre Furlan Examines the Myth and Fiction of Katherine Mansfield
Literary critic Pietro Citati once presented Katherine Mansfield not just as a leading writer, but as a modern and mythical figure on par with Virginia Woolf or Franz Kafka, according to an interview published by Le Monde. Writer and translator Pierre Furlan agrees with that assessment, noting that Mansfield’s aura long ago surpassed the purely literary sphere to turn her into a spiritual beacon.
Furlan has translated numerous English-language authors, including Russell Banks, Thomas Savage, Paul Auster, Janet Frame, and Alan Duff. His own short stories, including those in L’Atelier de Barbe-Bleue (Actes Sud, 2002), and his novel Le Rêve du collectionneur (Au vent des îles, 2009), have been translated in New Zealand. He stayed in Wellington in 2005 as the recipient of the Randell Cottage writers’ residency, and in 2006 he coordinated an issue of the journal Europe dedicated to New Zealand literature.
The Sacralization of Mansfield in France
In France, Mansfield was practically sacralized as early as the 1920s. Furlan explains that this momentum was driven by her husband, John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), who published an expurgated version of her letters and gathered scattered notebooks into a spiritually charged journal.
This curation established an extraordinary life story that often threatens to eclipse the fiction itself. Murry capitalized on the success of Mansfield’s short stories to publish her letters by the mid-1920s. By 1933, he collaborated with American researcher Ruth Elvish Mantz (1896–1980) to compose a biography, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, which did not hesitate to draw comparisons between Mansfield and Jesus.
How Myth Shapes Reading
The biographical myth has long competed with the stories that inspired it. Following the 1933 biography, readers and critics began explaining Mansfield’s fiction primarily through the lens of her lived experiences rather than the literary texts alone. Her letters, characterized by a tone both touching and elevated, primed audiences to view her as a figure embodying the suffering and purity of the romanticized artist.
Furlan notes that this persistent focus on her biography shapes how readers approach the prose to this day, illustrating a tension between the authorial legend and the foundational short stories that started it all.
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