Katherine Mansfield, blogger

As reported here last year, in January 2010 Katherine Mansfield started blogging. She’s still going, every day posting extracts from whatever she wrote on or about the same day 90 years earlier. It’s a nice idea: here is part of today’s entry, from a letter to Dorothy Brett written at her home in Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland on 25 July 1921:

This is a marvellous moment for peaches & apricots & wild strawberries. They grow lower down the mountains. Very little grows here except pines, wild flowers and occasional small bobbing cherries. I feel at present as though I could spend the rest of my life here, with occasional descents. But this is more what I would like for home than anything I have known. I don’t know why. There is a kind of charm. For one thing its so unspoilt - no railways, no motorcars, no casinos or jazz bands. Every tiny flower seems to shine with a new radiance. That queer chain of modern life seems to be unknown. I feel one will get younger and younger here & its fatal to begin laughing – one never leaves off.

And then you remember that Mansfield died in January 1932.

The blog and website is run by the Katherine Mansfield Society and its energetic chair, Gerri Kimber, an English academic who is currently in Wellington working with Vincent O’Sullivan on a definitive edition of Mansfield’s fiction. They are to talk about the project at a public meeting in Wellington on 10 August: it’s at 50 Homewood Avenue in Karori, and tickets are $12. 

It would pay to book: the event is being organised by the NZ-UK Link Foundation which is based at the British High Commission – their phone is (04) 924-2800, email is infonz@nzuklinkfoundation.org, or you could just send a cheque and contact details to NZ-UK Link Foundation, Box 1812, by Friday 5 August.