Katherine Mansfield's stories 1909-1914: the child and the 'childish'

In the six years after her arrival in England in 1908 Katherine Mansfield made a number of journeys to continental Europe, such as to Geneva, Bruges and Paris. These travels can be traced in stories that combine romance tropes with images of movement and interruption, drawing on her own romantic entanglements and unsettled circumstances. Her protagonists are inevitably youthful travellers or tourists surprised by the sudden awakenings that travel generates. This chapter analyses stories of adolescence about female vulnerability and transgression written during these years, focusing on the young subject who is susceptible to compelling but disillusioning romantic encounters, often occurring when they are in transit. It sees them in terms of her trajectory towards ‘The Aloe’ – the first draft was written in Paris in March to May 1915 – in which she refined and consolidated her style.