One of the dangers of any kind of historical fiction is that well known characters easily become costume-ball figures. Not so in Mansfield: the timid and yet priggish T. S. Eliot, the inspired and violent D. H. Lawrence, the kind and scatterbrained Lady Ottoline Morrell, the randy and politically engaged Bertrand Russell, the lovesick and intelligent Carrington are not summed up in the epithets I have given them but developed by Stead with loving subtlety as persons seen through Katherine Mansfield’s imagination and understanding, sometimes conjured up in only a few words of description or a successful turn of phrase. Let this example suffice (Eliot explaining why he uses the Latin name for the kiwi, Apteryx, as a pseudonym): ‘And it’s flightless — that’s really why I chose it. It suits my pose, you see. The anti-Romantic modern.’ Eliot’s persona is here defined in these less than 20 words.
After finishing Mansfield, I went back through its 246 pages, trying to see ‘how it’s done’ and, I must confess, I have no idea. A dearth of adjectives, an extraordinary accuracy of description merely through the use of verbs and nouns, the right intuition of when to comment and when to leave good enough alone, a taste for the right anecdote and a certain Mansfieldean humour that permeates the entire story from choice beginning to measured end: all these things no doubt contribute to build the moving, truthful core of this novel, but they hardly explain its perfect workings. These are the words Stead lends his Mansfield on the final page: ‘If I have to go … I’ll go quietly — but not quickly, and I will leave my fingerprints on things.’ This commitment, this knowledge that you must leisurely leave your mark on what you write, is perhaps a clue to the secret.
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