had been enthusiastic about setting up Katherine in her 'tower' at Higher Tregerthen where he envisaged her writing. But Katherine, for a number of reasons, did not want to be locked up in that (or any other) tower. Katherine for her part ranked Lawrence highly as a writer but she could also be critical of him. For example, in a letter to Murry on 13 June 1918, she tells him she is reading The Well Beloved by Thomas Hardy, which she found 'appalling bad'. She then sees that Hardy occasionally falls into 'a pretentious, snobbish, schoolmaster vein (Lawrence echoes it). 62 She reacted strongly against Women in Love, criticising Lawrence's depiction of 'satanic love' and also criticised him for his constant harping on the importance of maleness: 'When he gets on to the subject of maleness I lose all patience. What nonsense it all is - and he must know it is. His style changes he can no longer write. He begs the question. I can't forgive him for that - it's a sin.' 63 Nevertheless, she admired his 'passion'.

We don't know whether Lawrence ever said anything directly to Katherine about her work. But we do have some hint of what he felt about her writing when he wrote to Koteliansky in February 1917 after a split with the Murrys: 'Only for poor Katherine and her lies I feel rather sorry. They are such self-responsible lies.' 64 She herself felt she should get closer to real life and people and to 'purify' her work.

After Katherine's death, Murry vowed '[...] the only thing that matters to me is that she should have her rightful place as the most wonderful writer and most beautiful spirit of our time.' 65 Lawrence jibed at Murry's attempts to put Katherine on a literary pedestal, saying in a letter to Murry on 25 October,1923 'I got Dove's Nest here. Thank you very much. Poor Katherine, she is delicate and touching. - But not Great! Why say great?' 66

Critical opinion of Mansfield has waxed and waned since her death. It was clouded in the early years by the 'Mansfield Legend' created by Murry, as Jan Pilditch points out in the introduction to The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield.67 A survey of the contents of The Critical Response exposes as much about the prejudices, backgrounds, and social conditioning of the critics as it does the nature of Mansfield's writing. Latterly, her work has been subjected to feminist critique, Commonwealth critique, New Zealand patriotic critique, and so on. More recently some general agreement has been reached that Mansfield was a "substantial and crucial figure' in 20th century literature. That she was not a native-born Englishwoman is perhaps the most important element in her writing. As Andrew Gurr said in 1984:

Much of the best writing in English this century has been prose fiction by writers born outside the great metropolitan centres […] Consequently much of their finest fiction has been constructed about the distant homeland from the standpoint of exile.' 68

Curiously, this could also be said of Lawrence. He came to London as an exile from Nottinghamshire, and was able to create a fictionalised version of his 'homeland', just as Katherine did. But later Lawrence became even more of an 'expatriate' than Katherine. As relative outsiders with outstanding ability, Lawrence and Mansfield had a unique mutual understanding based on an innate recognition of each other's heightened awareness of reality, high intelligence, and a dedication to the art and labour of writing. Unlike many of his other friendships which ended in ashes, and despite occasional periods of hateful correspondence, Lawrence continued to the end to treat Katherine as a a fellow pilgrim on the difficult writers' road.

On hearing of her death, Lawrence wrote to Murry: 'Yes, I always knew a bond in my heart. Feel a fear where the bond is broken now.' 69 Katherine, too, recognised that Lawrence was special - 'one of the few real people ' 70

He found her a fascinating, enigmatic, subtle, contradictory personality- as his part-portrayal of her as Gudrun in Women in Love demonstrates He also saw in Katherine a courageous young woman, whom, as I have pointed out in this essay, he portrayed as Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl.

For if ever there was a lost girl, it was Katherine.

(Endnotes over page)

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Sandra Jobson Darroch ©2009