Linda Lappin

"Linda Lappin has immersed herself in Mansfield's life, and merged from it with a story to to narrate on her own terms, a fiction charged with the enthusiasm of a good researcher, and carried through with a novelist's verve." Vincent O'Sullivan, editor The Letters of Katherine Mansfield Vol V

A dazzling piece of literary sorcery" -- David Lynn, editor Kenyon Review

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

FROM RAIN TAXI Review of KATHERINE'S WISH
Linda Lappin
Wordcraft of Oregon ($15)

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. --Joyce J. Townsend

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