Edited by Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison
The book
This is the first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield's poetry, including 26 poems, dating from 1909–10, discovered by Gerri Kimber in the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2015.
This edition is made up of 217 poems, ordered chronologically, so that the reader can follow Mansfield's development as a poet and her experiments with different forms, as well as tracing the themes – love and death, the natural world and the seasons, childhood and friendship, music and song – that preoccupied her throughout her writing life. The comprehensive annotations provide illuminating biographical information as well as explaining the rich contexts of the European poetic tradition, including fin-de-siècle decadence within which Mansfield's artistry is steeped.
The inclusion of a collection of newly discovered poems highlights Mansfield's desire to be taken seriously as a poet from her earliest beginnings as a writer. The poems as a whole point to a poet who varied her craft as she perfected it, often witty and ironic yet always enchanted by the sound of words.
The editors
GERRI KIMBER is a visiting professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton, UK. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies and chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. She devised and is series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16).
CLAIRE DAVISON is professor of modernist studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. She is the author of Translation as Collaboration: Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and S.S. Koteliansky (2014). Her ongoing research focuses on trans-European modernist links on the radio in the 1930s–40s, and the links between modernist literature and music.
Publication details
Hardback with ribbon, 160 x 240mm, 238 pages, ISBN 978 1 877578 81 6, $35
Available in New Zealand and Australia only
November 2016, published in association with Edinburgh University Press