Sound Bite

This week I went into the ABC Radio and read five Katherine Mansfield stories for Anne Winter who produced and directed. The stories covered topics ranging from 'young love' to 'childhood rivalries' and 'unhappy marriage.' I read a series of Virginia Woolf stories from 'Mrs. Dalloway' last year and found preparing and performing them as demanding as any theatrical show. And so it should be. Radio does translate feeling and intention as strongly as visual drama and will soon find you out if you are half hearted.


Anne told me that Katherine had been ill in Switzerland when she wrote these stories, essentially to cover her medical expenses. That may give the feeling of them having been dashed off but they are quiet and deadly accurate, funny and sad and spine tingling. She died of TB at 34 which heightened the drama for me to think she could have written so much more given time.


Surprisingly, she had close contact with Virginia Woolf and her coterie and it is said that without her conversations with Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf would not have written 'Mrs Dalloway.'


Still, like many great artists, she was not much fun as a friend. D. H. Lawrence, no blushing flower himself, had a hard time with her even if, according to her biographer Kathleen Jones, he 'used her as the model for Gudrun in ‘Women in Love’. He and his wife lived in a ‘menage a quatre’ with Katherine and her husband which ended in such animosity that he afterwards sent her a postcard saying ‘You are a loathsome reptile; I hope you will die’. '


Well, she did and early too.

The Katherine Mansfield series will be broadcast in The Book Reading, Monday 25th – Friday, 29th May, 2009. The times are 2.05pm and repeated at 11.05pm. They will also be available as audio on demand, if you miss the broadcast.

To read more about Katherine Mansfield, click here.

http://www.katherinemansfield.net/life/briefbio1.htm
To hear a small excerpt from an American mp3