Eating and Reading with Katherine Mansfield

By Aimée Gasston
Like fast food and snacks, the short story has been derided as minor cuisine, ephemeral and
insubstantial, light fare compared to the novel’s sustenance. For Katherine Mansfield, a great
master of the form, eating offered a model for the sensuous consumption of her fiction — stories,
in turn, that are filled with scenes of alimentary pleasure. On the centenary of the New Zealand
writer’s death, Aimée Gasston samples her appetites.

PUBLISHED
January 9, 2023

Photograph of Katherine Mansfield by Ida Baker, 1920. The writer sits at her
work table with a tea tray in Villa Isola Bella, Menton, France — Source.

When in 1920 Katherine Mansfield quoted Coleridge in her notebook — “I, for one, do not call

the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood — identity in
these makes men of one country”— she replied beneath resolutely with the words: “The sod
under my feet makes mine”.1 For Mansfield, the messy materiality of the external world was

more keenly significant than any secondary intellectual ordering of it, as the redolent

sensuousness of her prose still attests. Reviewing the version of Mansfield's journal published by
her lover/husband John Middleton Murry in 1927, Virginia Woolf concluded: “She is a writer, a

born writer. Everything she feels and hears and sees is not fragmentary and separate; it belongs
together as writing”.2 Writing for Mansfield was a holistic expression of every one of her

heightened senses. But Woolf omitted one faculty that was crucial to Mansfield — taste.
Mansfield wrote poems about food in her notebooks, as well as recipes and grocery lists, and

would interrupt her prose with famished declarations such as: “Im so hungry, simply empty, and
seeing in my minds eye just now a surloin of beef, well browned and with plenty of gravy and
horseradish sauce and baked potatoes I nearly sobbed”.3 More recent additions to New Zealand’s

Alexander Turnbull Library's manuscripts collection add to its store of food-related Mansfieldian

matter, comprising shopping lists, receipts, and recipes for orange soufflé and cold-water scones.
This expanding wealth of material, both fictional and biographical, is not circumstantial evidence

of everyday life and art intermingling — it is far more often proof that, to Mansfield, the two
could never be separated.
 A draft of a poem by Katherine Mansfield, written in an account book. Above
the prices of tea, eggs, and marmalade, the lines read: “Tea, the chemist &
marmalade / Far indeed today I’ve strayed / Through paths untrodden, shops
unbeaten / And now the bloody stuff is eaten / The chemist the marmalade &
tea / Lord how nice & cheap they be!” Author’s photograph of material held by
the Alexander Turnbull Library — Source.

Young Kathleen Beauchamp was a chubby cuckoo of a child who at the age of ten would be

greeted sourly by her mother on the Wellington quay with the words “Well, Kathleen... I see you
are as fat as ever”.4 But as an adult she metamorphosed to become lean and wiry, her appearance
likely assisting Woolf’s assessment of her as “of the cat kind”.5 The First World War erupted

when Mansfield was living in London at the age of twenty-five, and induced an acute scarcity of

food as well as a meticulous rationing of what remained — a bureaucratisation of consumption

sent up by Mansfield in the satirical “Egg cards at Munich”.6 She would comment to Murry in a
letter of February 6, 1918: “Have you got your meat card? Of course, I think the meat cards will
stop the war. Nothing will be done but spot-counting, and people will go mad and butchers . . .
will walk around with bones in their hair, distracted”.7 Accordingly, at this time, a pervasive

focus on food began to build, its absence making it the stuff of persistent desire and,

appropriately enough, fiction.

For Mansfield, the war brought a catalogue of personal tragedies. In addition to the death of her

younger brother Leslie Beauchamp in 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis a year before
its end, in 1917. Mansfield's illness would change her relationship with food dramatically; as
Patricia Moran notes, “her emaciation required an obsessive attention to diet”.8 These contexts

trace a complex and mutable relationship with food that resonates through Mansfield's stories.

Food was a comforting, plentiful, and desirable luxury during her affluent upbringing, yet one
which had the propensity to make the overindulgent undesirable. During wartime, food became a

sparse commodity, reduced to its use value while provoking a richly imaginative fantasy life. To
the consumptive patient, however, its importance was even more acute.