I’ve now reached the years 1921 to 1923 in James King’s biography of Virginia Woolf. She has met, made friends with, adored and hated with equal vigour the fantastic New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield. She is becoming successful and known as a writer and has collected stringent criticisms and a great deal of praise for her work as well.
I’m particularly interested in her attraction to Katherine Mansfield because I love Mansfield’s work. It seems that the two women could often see that they were striving for the same thing in writing fiction, but when Katherine’s book ‘Bliss’ came out and was an immediate success, Virginia apparently hoped that she wouldn’t win the Hawthornden Prize and that another writer who was up for it, would get it instead.
But then, it seems she felt sorry for Katherine on discovering that her husband, Middleton Murray, was involved in an affair with someone else while Katherine was ill and alone. Ho-hum. And so Virginia wrote her a rather lovely letter in which she praises her work greatly and says ‘…you seem to me to go so straight and directly, – all clear as glass – refined, spiritual.’ About her own writing she says ‘My stuff gets muddy.’ So Virginia was jealous of Katherine’s ‘transparent quality’, an effect, according to James King, that she couldn’t get in her own work. But it did occur to me, I have to say, that Virginia as an upper class English woman would have been constantly aware of ‘class’ and surely that could muddy things enormously. Whereas Katherine, as a New Zealander, was class-free, [although that might have changed later, as she spent time with the English]. So what I mean is that the way they look at people and then the way they construct characters would have been quite different.
This business of Virginia both loving and hating the same person was something she felt for other friends as well, and when she was in hatred with them, she was very cruel.
