Introduction: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Epistolarity

Summary

The letters of born letter writers provide their own continuity. They make us feel soon that we have our seat at the centre of the pageant, in the depths of [her] mind, which unfolds itself page by page as we read. For she possessed indisputably the gift which counts for more in letter writing than wit or brilliance or traffic with great people; she gave herself away merely by being herself without a word of emphasis or analysis, and thus envelop all these odds and ends in the mesh of her own personality.

Woolf was writing about what she would call one ‘of the obscure’, the seventeenth century’s long-forgotten epistolary craftswoman, Dorothy Osborne. And like all great letter writers, Osborne didn’t just write letters, she wrote about them, keenly aware that their material presence, style, voice and craftsmanship were not mere accessories, too often dispensable, but desirable and essential testimonies whose lives and afterlives would always escape writer and reader, all the more so when they circulated across Europe in times of diplomatic tension, religious conflict and inter-state war as Osborne’s did. Nor could they be too beholden to conventions. As she wrote to her husband, William Temple,

great Schollers are not the best writer’s (of letters I mean, of books perhaps they are) […] all letters, mee thinks, should be free and easy as one’s discourse, not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm.

It is impossible not to see Katherine Mansfield in her rightful place as one of the artists of letter writing resonating within Dorothy Osborne’s and Virginia Woolf’s words. As this second volume shows, we are indeed here at the centre of the pageant of her mind, as she envelops a host of odds and ends in the mesh of a personality which is her own precisely because it is at the same time a chorus of selves, personae and voices, performing the everyday freely and easily into existence to delight the reader. Not that every word that Woolf says here fits the volume to come.