A fragment of an unknown play by Tennessee Williams

During the First World War Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence shared a catastrophic idyll in Cornwall and London which, as Gerri Kimber reveals in an article in the Times Literary Supplement this week, provided the backdrop for an “unpublished and unnamed play by Tennessee Williams”. In a scene called “Night of the Zeppelin” the friends celebrate a cold Christmas with a charade about Nero fiddling at Rome and speculation on how much the price of a single torpedo would transform their personal finances. Gerri uncovered the piece whilst on a Harry Ransom Research Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin this summer. The full text of the play fragment will be published in volume 7 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, to be published by Edinburgh University Press next year.