8 February 2023 - 8 February 2023
6:30PM - 7:30PM
Collected Books
£5.00
At this event run by Collected Books, Claire Harman will talk with Naomi Booth about her exciting new biography, published at the same time as a beautiful new hardback collection of Mansfield's stories, specially selected by Claire.
All Sorts of Lives: Katharine Mansfield and the Art of Losing Everything, by Claire Harman
Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield's short but dazzling life was characterised by struggle, insecurity and sacrifice - alongside a glorious, relentless creative drive and openness.
She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet in 1957 Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, 'Where is she - our missing contemporary?' Now, looking back over the hundred years since her death, it is evident how vital Mansfield was to the Modernist movement and how strikingly relevant she is today, helping us to see differently, to savour and to notice things.
In her dynamic and perceptive study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield's biography and achievements side by side, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield's desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary love of life: 'Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small.'
Professor in Creative Writing, Durham University
Professor Claire Harman won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first book, a biography of the novelist and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner (1989), and has since published biographies of Fanny Burney (2000), Robert Louis Stevenson (2005) and Charlotte Brontë (2015), and Jane’s Fame (2009), a study of Jane Austen’s legacy and influence.
Associate Professor, Department of English Studies, Durham University
Dr Naomi Booth is a writer and academic. Her fiction explores, amongst other things, weird landscapes, concentric objects, compulsive fainting, pregnancy, skin, crocuses, environmental contamination. Her academic work focuses on the literary history of swooning and on contemporary fiction, especially in relation to depictions of the environment and the body.
Includes 25% discount on one copy of All Sorts of Lives.
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