Authors Electric

On the 9th of January it will be the 90th anniversary of the death of Katherine Mansfield - one of the icons of 20th century literature.  She died from tuberculosis, a couple of months after her 34th birthday, leaving behind 4 collections of short stories and a huge mass of unpublished journals, letters and fragments of fiction. Strange things happen after the death of an author.  They either sink gracefully from view, or their work develops a life of its own, marching forward into a future the author could never have imagined, read by people in bizarrely different circumstances, finding meanings they never consciously intended.  In Katherine Mansfield’s case, her husband, the editor and critic John Middleton Murry, was so full of guilt at the way he’d treated her when she was alive, he made it his life’s work to preserve and publish everything she’d ever written. His obsession with her ruined his three subsequent marriages and created a poisonous legacy for his...