Mansfield in illustrious list of writers

By GORDON MCLAUCHLAN

The saying goes that you don't know how good writers are until they've been dead a few years. Well, time is certainly escalating the reputation of Katherine Mansfield.

The Folio Society, publisher of beautiful books, polled its members - thousands of serious readers from around the world - for an opinion on the greatest books of the past century in any language in 20 literary genres.

Stories by Mansfield won the short-story category and she joined an illustrious list of authors, among them Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot.

New Zealanders have always regarded her with reverence; indeed, she was for many years an oppressive presence in our literary history, hovering insurmountably over the aspirations of later writers.

I was impressed rather than engaged by her stories when I first read them at secondary school. Action was my genre.

"Nothing," I declared to my doting father (he doted on Mansfield, not on me), "ever happens, except heads are turned and eyebrows raised and lowered."

The older I got, though, the more she impressed me.

But now she's made it to the very top, in the opinion of discerning readers who, in the long term, will prove more important than critics.

The Folio Society is publishing special editions of all 20 winners this year. The collection in The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, illustrated with oil paintings by New Zealand-born artist Susan Wilson, was chosen by William Trevor, himself short-listed in the short-story category, and he pays homage to Mansfield in an introduction.

In a note on her choice as short-story writer of the century, a Mansfield biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes: "Mansfield's greatness derives from her ability to control and then detonate highly compressed emotion and to make the central symbol express a universal theme. A beautiful woman and immensely talented writer, [she] died tragically at the age of 34, just as she had finally achieved mastery of her art."

The category winners are: autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou; children's book, Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne; eyewitness account, If This is a Man, Primo Levi; historical novel, The Leopard, Guiseppe di Lampedusa; novel, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust; religion and philosophy, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; travel and exploration, The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron; play, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett; biography, Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey; poetry, The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot; essays, belles lettres, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf; crime/thriller, The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler; humour, Jeeves and Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse; military history, The Second World War, Winston Churchill; music and performing arts, My Life in Art, Constantin Stanislavski; the sciences, What is Life, Erwin Schrodinger; visual arts, Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich; natural history, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson.

Oh dear me, I've read only 10 of them.