‘Illness in Absence’: Mansfield and Murry's Collaborative Text: 19181

Abstract

Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry's correspondence between January and April of 1918 can be read as a collaborative text in which each participant engages in the construction of a writing self. The text's narrative is teleological and the story it depicts is the heroic struggle of two lovers separated by fate in the forms of war and illness. The story's climax is the bombardment of Paris, and its denouement will be the wedding of its two lovers. Murry constructs his writing self as a poet, but his self-projection fails to coincide with his talents, although Mansfield encourages his aspirations. She wants to write ‘love prose’. Both writers link themselves with the Romantics, not only as poets but as people. This identification allows them to set themselves in opposition to Bloomsbury, especially to Lady Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf. Murry's writing becomes delusionary due to exhaustion from his work at the War Office. Mansfield's entrapment in Paris during the bombardment is captured in ...