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 Linda Lappin From the Historical Novel Review
KATHERINE’S WISH Linda Lappin, Wordcraft of Oregon, 2008,
$15.00, pb, 228pp, 9781877655586
Bandol, France, 1918. A frail young woman
boards a military train, coughing discreetly into
her handkerchief. The throng of war-weary
soldiers is unaware she is a famous English
author traveling south to fight the ravages of
tuberculosis. Indeed, she tells them a story to
justify traveling alone: she is going to meet her
“wounded husband.”
Katherine Mansfield was very good with
stories, and this one satisfies, to her relief. She
misses her real husband, John Middleton Murry,
at home in England carrying on with his work as
an esteemed literary critic. Unaware how ill and
lonely she would be, he forwards her books to
be read and reviewed during her convalescence.
Murry sees their relationship as the merging
of two great minds with a combined genius
that would assure them a place in history. It
became apparent that her health was in danger
and sending her to France for a “cure” removed
him from any bother, not being a man to stop
working to tend a sick wife.
Katherine was a most determined writer,
defying mercurial comments by former friend
D. H. Lawrence (who despised her “ill health”)
and the disdain of the social coterie of Lady
Ottoline, a woman who fêted the usual literary
suspects known as the Bloomsberries. For a
time, Virginia Woolf became Katherine’s friend,
albeit reservedly, as the two discussed their
mutual passion for writing.
Everyone involved in Katherine’s life,
including her underappreciated friend and
supplicant Ida Baker, who clung to serving her
genius despite rebuffs, is presented as they may
have appeared in her personal diary. Capturing
the latter part of Katherine’s life and world, the
author brings vivid life to this novel, which reads
like a literary biography of Katherine Mansfield
and her contemporaries. --Tess Allegra
Coming Soon in November 2010 Spirit of Place On Line Workshop with Linda Lappin Writing about place, memory, identity, discovery For information click here BIOGRAPHY
Linda Lappin was born in Kingsport, Tennessee. She received her BA from Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Fla. and her MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She has published a chapbook of poetry, Wintering with the Abominable Snowman , with kayak press of Santa Cruz, Ca.
She divides her time between the US and Italy, where she is currently teaching English language
and translation at the University of
the Tuscia in Viterbo and organizing writing workshops in Vitorchiano, a medieval town near Rome.Her essays, fiction,
poetry, travel pieces and reviews appear widely in
US periodicals. Her essays have been nominated
for the Pushcart Prize and her short fiction
has been broadcast by the BBC World Service
Radio. Active as literary translator, she has translated Carmelo Samona' and Federigo
Tozzi. She has received two NEA grants
in translation and the Renato
Poggioli Award in Translation from PEN
Interview with Linda Lappin from the Kingsport Times News
Date Published: May 21, 2005
Kingsport native publishes first novel
Author: LEIGH ANN LAUBE
Harriet Sackett, an outspoken feminist American photographer who travels the world wearing pants instead of ladylike dresses, goes to Italy to photograph Etruscan tombs. She gets more than she bargains for when she meets Federigo del Re, who claims to be a reincarnated Etruscan spirit.
"The Etruscan," (Wynkin deWorde Ltd., $26), Kingsport native Linda Lappin's first novel, is set in an area of Italy called Tuscia - Etruscan territory - in the 1920s. It's an area untouched by tourism where the people still live by ancient trades.
It's been Lappin's home for nearly a decade.
A 1971 graduate of Dobyns-Bennett High School, Lappin attended Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., and earned her master of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. She went to Italy on a Fulbright grant and eventually got a job teaching English at the University of Rome.
"That was in 1981. It was very exciting to live in a European capital and teach at an Italian university. I enjoyed it so much that I just stayed on," she said. "I later switched to a smaller university in a town north of Rome, Viterbo, located in Etruscan country, where I became interested in the Etruscans. Then I married an Italian in 1992, and so it looks as though I have settled down for good here."
Because of her interest in the writers and atmosphere of the early 20th century, and because of other influences, Lappin's novel opens in 1920s London and closes in 1945.
"The great English novelist, D.H. Lawrence, visited the Etruscan areas of Italy in the '20s and wrote a travel book about the Etruscans, entitled ‘Sketches of Etruscan Places,' near the end of his life. Lawrence was a very environmental-conscious writer for his times, and he hated the way mining and industrialization had destroyed the English countryside. He also felt that the then-dreadful conditions for workers in the mines and industries had reduced human beings of the early 20th century to machines. He imagined the Etruscans, who were technologically very sophisticated and also very artistically inclined, as a people who lived in harmony with nature and with their inner being, unlike modern men."
"He also believed they were the custodians of the secret of life," she said. "The Etruscans weren't very well-known in the '20s. We know much more about them today, though they still remain mysterious. Lawrence's beliefs about the Etruscans as possessors of a secret knowledge concerning the meaning of life was one of the main inspirations for my novel."Lappin's story centers on the adventures of photographer Harriet Sackett, who travels to the Tuscia to photograph and research the Etruscan tombs.
Months later, Harriet's friend Sarah, and Sarah's husband Stephen, meet up with Harriet in Florence. Sarah become deeply worried about Harriet's welfare and, on her return to London, Sarah sends her housekeeper to help for awhile. Almost immediately, the housekeeper, Mrs. Parsons, sends an urgent telegram summoning Sarah and Steven back to Italy.
Mrs. Parsons has found Harriet emaciated, on the point of collapse and unable to communicate. The atmosphere in the country cottage is deeply unsettling and the only clue to her condition is the discovery of a diary documenting a passionate relationship with the mysterious Federigo del Re.
While working on the novel, Lappin lived in a farmhouse outside the gates of the old town, with a window overlooking a gorge where dozens of tombs have been hollowed out of the rock face. While doing research, Lappin discovered that it was quite common for local people to believe they were somehow in touch with the Etruscans, who were defeated by the ancient Romans long before the birth of Christ.
"Nearly every home in the area has a collection of valuable - and nowadays illegal - Etruscan artifacts gathered by grandfathers or great-grandfathers, dug up while plowing a field or on a tomb-hunting expedition," Lappin said. "Before the Second World War, many families supplemented their income by digging up artifacts and selling them to dealers in Rome. Many people discovered tombs in their back yards or on their farmlands. Living surrounded by the evidence of a vanished and mysterious people who believed that death was only a transition to another state of being obviously had an impact on the local culture.
"So it is common, particularly in older people born before the Second World War, to feel a special connection with the Etruscans, to fantasize that they are descended from noble Etruscan families.
"I was very struck by this attitude, which partly inspired the figure of Federigo del Re. The count is really based more on characters from literature, like Healthcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights' or Mr. Rochester in ‘Jane Eyre,' than on any historical person. But after I wrote the book I learned that there was a man living in the area in the '30s and '40s, a member of a local noble family, who claimed to be in contact with the Etruscans and was himself a reincarnated Etruscan spirit. I didn't know that while I was writing the book."
Lappin, who has just completed "Katherine's Wish," a new novel based on the life of writer Katherine Mansfield, plans to return to Kingsport in August to visit her parents.
Lappin is still trying to work out distribution for "The Etruscan" in the United States, she said. "The best way to get it at present is through the British amazon, www.amazon.co.uk It's very easy to order the book from them. There is also an online Irish bookstore, www.kennys.ie, that will ship at cheap prices all over the world."
Lappin is also helping organize writers workshops for American universities and colleges through her organization Centro Pokkoli. She will bring the Kenyon Review Writing Workshop from Kenyon College, in Ohio, to Vitorchiano in June, followed by a group from Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.For more information on Lappin, her books or the writers workshops, visit www.lindalappin.net, www.TheEtruscan.com and www.pokkoli.com.
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She reads and readsCanadian blog focusing on women's fiction
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Linda Lappin ties for First Prize in the Katherine Mansfield Society International Essay Prize with her essay "A Parallel Quest." The theme of the contest was the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence
More Praise for Katherine's Wish
"Lappin’s achievement is ... to give Katherine Mansfield ongoing life. " Walter Cummins,
The Literary Review, Winter 2008
"Honest,uncompromising, insightful...A fast-paced and fully rewarding read. Perigee 23
"First and foremost the compelling story of an artist fighting against time. Long after the last page, thoughts of her linger like an exotic scent." Rain Taxi
"Intensely imagined," South China Morning Post
A Masterpiece! Among Best Books of 2008, Katherine Graham, Vine Voice
Katherine's Wish is a Book Pick September/October 2008, Small Press Review
Praise for Katherine's Wish from RainTaxi
Katherine’s Wish
Linda Lappin
Wordcraft of Oregon ($15)
by Joyce J. Townsend
Many literati recognize Katherine Mansfield’s name but are fuzzy about her context and accomplishments. A New Zealand native, Mansfield is lauded as one of our language’s great writers of short fiction. She had ties to the famed Bloomsbury Group active in London in the early 1900s, a collection of artists, writers, and other English intellectuals who demonstrated a bisexual freedom ahead of their time.
After twenty years of fascination with Mansfield, and fifteen years of active research, Linda Lappin confidently expands our knowledge in her latest novel, Katherine’s Wish. While the relationships, events, and inner musings of the characters are fictionalized, Lappin has built on textual evidence from journals, letters, and diary entries in order to adhere to “an overall sense of truth” which she renders as her own mosaic. Her writing style, with its rhythm, flow, and sensual detail, richly evokes the significant social scene of a vanished era.
Katherine Mansfield was deeply committed to achieving excellence at her craft. In one section, propped on pillows in bed, she scribbles a ditty about her absent husband—“Who’s the man as cold as stone / to leave a wife like you alone?”—and concludes that her only solution to loneliness and disappointment is to write:
She must not hold back out of false modesty or propriety. She must tell all; she must deposit her few grains, her residue of truth. She must not fear that friends or acquaintances might recognize themselves in unflattering portraits. . . . It was not their personalities . . . she wanted to describe now, but rather types, situations, conditions of existence in which anyone . . . might recognize themselves, if only for an instant. There was nothing personal about it.
Despite loneliness, growing illness and physical disability, Katherine perseveres. “The valve would open to release a rush of words like water from a long-trapped spring.”
Set against the backdrop of war-torn 1920’s Europe, the three main characters are fully realized: Mansfield, the consummate artist, willful, critical, and obsessed; her self-satisfied, priggish, and adoring husband, British literary critic John Middleton Murry; and Ida Constance Baker, Katie’s plodding devotee and handmaiden since they were schoolgirls together. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and Frieda, and other notables appear as social intimates.
Like any writer worth her salt, Linda Lappin never gets in the way of her characters fulfilling their destinies. The book probably could have included more about Mansfield’s background to help bridge the unsettling disparity between her father’s wealth and her own financial situation, which often leads her to despair and degradation. But Katherine’s Wish is first and foremost the compelling story of an artist fighting against time. Long after the last page, thoughts of her linger like an exotic scent, as if, anticipating other guests, she simply stepped from the room to display a vase of flowers or a platter’s mounded figs.
Praise for KATHERINE'S WISH from PERIGEE N.23
Full of early 20th century unrest and color, Katherine's Wish transports us to war-era Europe, where the ailing Katherine Mansfield frequently travels to escape Britain's harsh winters. Ruthlessly compelled by her creative urges, Mansfield rejects conventional treatment for her tuberculosis, appreciating that a sanatorium denies her solitude and imposes a rest cure, both of which would prevent her from writing. She is an artist, stalked by poverty and disease, with a Keatsian drive to "[glean her] teeming brain" before time runs out, writing more than twenty-three short stories, including the frequently anthologized "Miss Brill," between 1918 and her death in 1924. For Mansfield, "Work was the only consolation for the new state of things. Writing was a second breath, a second chance."
It took over twenty years for novelist Linda Lappin to complete her fictional biography on Katherine Mansfield, and the payoff for us is a captivating tale of Katherine's Wish to live, chronicling the period when she became intensely aware of her mortality and rebelled against the disease that eventually consumed her, the period that came to define her as a fighter with savage courage—the last five years of her life. A master story-teller, Lappin weaves a tale that is triumphant, genuine and tender in its unfolding. With vivid details and imagery born of careful research, she brings Mansfield to life, her voice so clear and authentic we are convinced that she is more than Lappin's character. She is Mansfield: sexually reckless, socially excitable, temperamentally damaged, spiteful and cruel, appealing and vulnerable. She is Mansfield—a tragic and unconventional heroine.
Lappin tells Mansfield's story through an old Shakespearean technique—various points of view. Katherine's Wish is a 3rd person account fashioned from Mansfield's life, letters, and journal entries as well as those of her philandering and egocentric husband, John Middleton Murry, and her irritating but loyal companion, Ida Constance Baker. The interplay of these three differing perspectives lends credibility to Lappin's depiction of her characters, particularly Mansfield, reducing what in so many other fictional biographies feels like forced or affected character development. We see Mansfield for what she was—a flawed and self-absorbed human being as are most artists. Ego feeds art. Self-absorption is just one of the means used to access that elusive place where art lives within the meditating psyche. And because we recognize the value and genius of this particular artist cut down at only 34, we forgive Mansfield her selfish egotism. In fact, we care about her and wonder what more she might have contributed to literature had she not died so young.
Lappin's skillful blend of fact and fiction leaves us entertaining the possibility that Katherine's Wish is more biography than novel. It is an honest, uncompromising, and insightful view into Mansfield, the culture that molded her, and the people who surrounded her. It is also a fast-paced and fully rewarding read.
Praise for KATHERINE'S WISH from the South China Morning Post
Katherine Mansfield wrote many resonant short stories but her enduring appeal is owing to other factors. She was one of the first colonials to establish herself at the centre of London literary life; she had affairs
with people of both sexes, which created an aura of scandal, and died early, at 34 in 1923, which added to her myth.
American author Linda Lappin has undertaken a daunting task in her novel about Mansfield. The trouble with fictional biographies of real people
is readers often know the outlines of the story and are not given new insights into the characters: in this case, Mansfield's friend D.H. Lawrence
is, as expected, both colourful and cussed while, again as expected, her handsome husband, literary critic Middleton Murry, is indecisive and
lacklustre.
But Lappin, wearing 15 years of research into Mansfield lightly, rises to the challenges.
Instead of trying to trace Mansfield's whole life Lappin focuses on the last four years, when she was trying to write as much as possible before
her likely death from consumption. Her contradictory Mansfield, both irritable and sensitive, is convincingly complex.
The highlight of Katherine's Wish is Mansfield's relationship with her lifelong friend Ida Baker, who is clumsy, dull and necessary. It is hard to
tell whether Ida's devotion is altruistic or an attempt to possess Katherine. Her stolidity is a splendid foil for Katherine's flighty
brilliance. Katherine is exasperated by Ida: "Her breaking things. Her inane conversation. Her appalling ignorance. Her maudlin tears. Her suffocating
care." Here is Ida fumbling with change: "Katherine knew she should be grateful, yet Ida's every awkward gesture, every little blunder jarred her
nerves." But they stayed together almost to the end, with Katherine frequently screaming in exasperation at Ida and later suffering remorse because she
recognised that she could not have written 10 words in her last years, "if Ida had not been there to make the tea, boil the eggs, rush back and forth
with her hot-water bottles, however tepid, and keep her supplied with stamps and milk and bread, while she lay wrapped in blankets".
Lappin's novel begins in 1918 and follows Mansfield as she moves to and from London and the wartime Italian and French rivieras, where she
sought relief from her tuberculosis. She falls into the hands of a charlatan whose alleged cure worsens her condition. Finally she reaches a villa at Fontainebleau, France, where she entrusts herself to Russian guru Georges Gurdjieff. There is a ghastly irony in the fact that she died within three
months, suffering a haemorrhage after running up stairs to show her husband how well she was.
Lappin's intensely imagined novel will satisfy readers unfamiliar with Mansfield as well as those already intrigued by her. --Desmond O'Grady
Praise from the Literary Review for KATHERINE’S WISH Linda Lappin. Katherine’s Wish.
La Grande, Oregon: Wordcraft of Oregon, 2008.
The more Katherine Mansfield approaches death, the more she comes to life in Linda Lappin’s Katherine’s Wish. That’s not to say that she isn’t a vivid character from the very first paragraphs of the novel, in 1918, on a train pulling its way through a blizzard, trapped in a compartment “pervaded by the sickening smell of mothballs, perspiration, and wet galoshes,” taking “short, tremulous breaths to keep herself from coughing.” This initial image of her in a coffin-like carriage on a frantic journey to Mediterranean sun, in pain, immersed in white embodies her condition and the struggles she will face throughout the next four years in a desperate and futile effort to stay alive.
Many luminaries populate the novel, from D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf to the more rarified characters, such as Chekhov translator S.S. Koteliansky, Lady Ottoline, and P.D. Ouspensky, along with Katherine’s intimates, her wealthy, distant father, Ida Constance Baker, her smitten, service companion since childhood, her self-absorbed, philandering husband, John Middleton Murry, and his mistresses.
Lappin spent nearly two decades researching and writing Katherine’s Wish, as evidenced by the consequent specificity and vivid details. The interiors of the many rooms and the exteriors of the many landscapes are described with a cinematic richness: “This cool, wet August had plumped the blackberries on the bushes along the garden wall. She could almost taste their tartness with her eyes, but the leaves of the willows were edged in brown . . .” This is hardly a typical costume drama, decorated with dusty artifacts and burdened by the mythology of its famous protagonists.
Of particular note is Lappin’s ability to create original portrayals of Woolf and Lawrence, a fresh way of seeing people whose identities are almost clichés, as in this meeting between Mansfield and Woolf:
Conversations with Virginia were agonizingly slow to ignite. One had to break through the cocoon of isolation Virginia spun around herself, with her perfect demeanor, her flawless chitchat, even those ludicrous hats and dresses she wore were a deterrent to keeping others from coming too close.
But most crucial is the evocation of Katherine’s consumption, the painful stages of her dying, her struggles for survival, her growing debilitation. Lappin reveals the spots on the lungs, the dysentery and fevers, the “ominous heaving rumble” of her coughing. Ultimately, she makes readers care about a writer dead for more than eighty years, and share Katherine’s own wish that she could live forever. Lappin’s achievement is to succeed where medicine failed and, through her words, give Katherine Mansfield ongoing life. --Walter Cummins
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR KATHERINE’S WISH
Katherine’s Wish is a beautifully observed novel. Linda Lappin has created far more than a haunting portrait of Katherine Mansfield, that subtlest and most modern of writers—it’s as if the unfinished stories, notes jotted in journals or letters suddenly coalesced. Katherine’s Wish grants the writer’s own final wish to give permanent shape to the arc of a life in which the creative and the personal are inseparable. The novel reveals a core truth: that Mansfield’s was not so much
a creative life cut short as one that flourished so long against all odds. —Alexandra Johnson, author of The Hidden Writer
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Katherine’s Wish , fifteen years in the making, is a dazzling bit of fictional sorcery, conjuring to life the bright and talented swirl of modern society in the 1920s.Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, Virginia Woolf—these vibrant individuals who created a rich universe such as had never been known before -live in the pages of Linda Lappin’s latest novel with a fierceness of energy and intellect and yearning. This novel is a must read, whether you have historical interests per se or only enjoy a story so compelling and moving that there’s no putting it down. I certainly couldn’t!” —David Lynn, editor, the Kenyon Review
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The author of two critically successful historical novels, Prisoner of Palmary and The Etruscan , Linda Lappin turns her gifted hand to fictional biography in Katherine’s Wish. Short-lived and so poignantly, if not tragically, dedicated to the art of fiction as Romantic poets once lived and died for the Muse, the unconventional Katherine Mansfield is brought to life in this novel of 1918 to 1923, encompassing her marriage to British critic John Middleton Murry, her travels across war-devastated Europe, and her death by tuberculosis
at the spiritual asylum in Fontainebleau run by G. I. Gurdjieff. Like the “new biography” of Lytton Strachey and analogous fiction by Virginia Woolf, Lappin’s
fictional life of Mansfield recreates the ineffable, “rainbow-like” essence of a human being from the inside perspective of three people: Mansfield herself, her
traveling companion Ida Baker, and Murry. The factual basis of Lappin’s work is scrupulously researched so that the milieu, or social and literary context, seems to come alive, too. Even away from London, in the chapter “Hotel Beau Rivage, 1918,” for example, Bloomsbury beckons, heightening the longing as
well as the pain of separation.
—Wayne K. Chapman, editor, The South Carolina Review
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