A Literary Impressionist?: Mansfield's Painterly Vignettes

Despite the constant recourse to different stylistic tendencies throughout her mature fiction, one of the most striking features of Katherine Mansfield's writing is its pictorial quality, which demonstrates a heightened aestheticism and a desire to realise painterly effects within a verbal or written medium – a concept which her diaries and letters reinforce. Her stories point towards a congruent knowledge of developments and trends in the visual arts, particularly Impressionism. While leading scholars have linked Mansfield to Impressionism, her work has been neither explored nor substantiated from an art-historical perspective. This essay draws on research into the concept of literary impressionism, alongside Mansfield's early exposure to painterly Impressionism in New Zealand and abroad. It aims to elucidate possible painterly sources for her highly pictorial prose and to consider the painterly quality of her work, shaped by that exposure, in several of her earliest stories. These demonstrate how early ...