Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot: A Literary Frisson

Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot had a friendly but fraught relationship in which her initial admiration turned into wariness, and his attitude to her became openly hostile. Their acquaintance began through the Bloomsbury Circle, and was reinforced by Mansfield’s enthusiasm for ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, of which she said: ‘that’s what I want modern poetry to be’, and ‘it is after all, a short story’. But by 1920 she saw his poetry as ‘unspeakably dreary’, while he formed the view that she was ‘a thick skinned toady’, and ‘a dangerous WOMAN’. Theirs was an ambivalent relationship that became mired in antagonism and betrayal.

The chapter discusses the influence of Eliot’s avant garde modernism on Mansfield’s artistic practice at this time, evident in verbal echoes and allusions from early poems like “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in stories and sketches like “The Common Round” and “Pictures.” . It focuses on Mansfield’s story “Feuille D’Album” in relation to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” whose study of inhibited, alienated subjectivity inspired a semi-realist fantasy and revised cityscape, that show advances in her modernist narrative technique. Published in September 1917, just after Mansfield first read ‘Prufrock’ in June , this story is read as a gendered ‘writing back’ to Eliot’s inhibited, procrastinating protagonist, and it is contextualised with testimony about Eliot’s behaviour in the company of women then. Ironically, Mansfield is a satirical target of Eliot’s enigmatic prose piece “Eeldrop and Appleplex,”’ published in The Little Review in the same month of 1917. Whether Mansfield knew of Eliot’s writing on her or whether Eliot read Mansfield’s stories as comments on him (and on him and Vivien) is not known; nevertheless such fictional reconstructions of each other provide new contexts for understanding their problematic relationship.