Katherine Mansfield

So those are the two components.

The most extreme example of that that I found was a New Zealander writer called Catherine Mansfield.

who actually wrote about not being clear who she was.

And her husband, who, by the way, she left after about a day of marriage, talked about how you never knew who she was going to be at any given time.

She's a fledgling short story writer, but she shows great promise.

She's a little bit modelled on Catherine Mansfield, the eminent short story writer from New Zealand, who befriended D.H. Lawrence.

And like many people, At that time, Catherine Mansfield made that pilgrimage to the Côte d'Azur, apparently to be revived by the sea air.

But, oh, I have to say, many, many weren't there to die.

D.H. Lawrence, Catherine Mansfield, Chekhov.

And she's at a clinic called the Villa Celeste in the 1920s.

Clementine, on the other hand, is...

And I think it was a particularly unhappy and dark time in her life.

And it was also a time where she was stretching to become the novelist that people then associate with the Virginia Woolf style.

So in some ways, I always say it's her teenage novel and it has this kind of teenage energy to it in as much as it has lots of arms and legs and it's quite awkward and it's stretching for who it wants to be.

And I think that that teenage energy was something I actually talked to the director, Tina Garavi, about a lot because we were often talking about John Hughes movies.

But I feel that those great teen rom-coms that he made, that spirit is very much there.

in the adaptation of the book, but it's also true to what the book was itself.

It was her kind of teenage novel, and she immediately disowned it, partly because another great novelist, Catherine Mansfield, wrote such an excoriating review of it when it was published.

um after world war one on top of that there was obviously this trauma about she had written a novel that in in no way dealt with what had happened to her generation during world war one and that's what catherine mansfield really focused on so virginia woolf It kind of distanced herself from the novel for these two reasons, I feel.

But, you know, as so often with Virginia Woolf, there are complications and contradictions, and she does see...

the good in katherine mansfield as well and you know takes the value from that and also there's there's an interesting thing in that the smell of being a civic cat i mean it's a horrible thing to say i'm not i don't really want to diminish that but there are things to know i mean one is that all kinds of people at this time not that this is an excuse but you know in virginia wolf's world perfume or scent as they would have called it was frowned upon no one no one wore it You know, it was seen as a mark of, well, as she describes, being a kind of streetwalker.

But there's another complication in that Catherine Mansfield, she wore this expensive French perfume called Jeanne Fleuret, which means flowering broom.

And broom was the flower that surrounded Virginia Woolf's mother's coffin at her funeral, essentially.

Yeah.

Well, this has been wonderful, Sam.

Thank you so much for introducing me to Katherine Mansfield.

This will not be my last encounter because I absolutely loved these three stories.