This article is taken from PN Review 287, Volume 52 Number 3, January - February 2026.
To travel both and be one traveller…
Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield Give Life Lessons on Poetry in Prose
In Munich recently, en route to Bayreuth for Wagner and performances of that particular iteration of Wissenschaft, I was startled to see, passing before me on the other side of the street, a line of three barefoot boys in wetsuits all carrying surfboards. Their hair was damp and their boards clearly just out of the water. But how? Where was the beach? The sea? We were in the middle of a landlocked city in Bavaria, an urban criss-cross of grand squares and two-lane expressways… Where was the wave?
The boys’ profiles as they passed before me – elbows at an angle and their boards pointing forward, bare feet flat on the ground, heel to toe – were elongated and purposeful as the drawings of pharaohs on the walls of Egyptian tombs. Who were they? Where had they come from? Was any of this real?
These are the kinds of questions – many and varied – that come to mind when I consider the life and work of Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield. ‘Who are these people?’, V.S. Pritchett famously asked of the characters and the implied author of Mansfield’s short stories. ‘We can scarcely guess.’ It was as though anything to do with the New Zealand-born writer – those fictions of hers based on her family and upbringing in a tiny city way off in the South Pacific – only beggared belief. How could someone, who came from that far away, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, be part of any contemporary modernist literary scene, let alone the one that flourished in Bloomsbury and the salons of Lady Ottoline Morell and Virginia Woolf? ‘The inscrutable woman remains inscrutable’, Woolf wrote in her diary in 1919 – behind her, as I imagine it, those roundly herbaceous borders of her house in Sussex, all gillyflowers and sweet William and forget-me-nots. Hardly any room, in those beds, for the waving fronds of toi toi and manuka bush that would have been planted in Mansfield’s country garden. ‘Has she no home?’ asked Frank O’Conner, addressing what he called Mansfield’s ‘conscious, deliberate acts of magic’. Who is this woman? Where does she belong?
Muriel Spark invites much of the same. In the opening chapter of his warm and thoroughly considerate biography of Edinburgh’s surely most famous literary daughter, the journalist and critic Alan Taylor notes another pharaoh on the city streets. ‘Away from anywhere in which she felt constricted and obligated and misunderstood, she could work untrammelled’, he writes, in his Appointment in Arezzo. ‘No one should be deceived,’ he goes on, referring to Spark’s many decisions to change everything about the way she lived into another thing, ‘that the road had been straight and smooth.’ Here’s the Morningside girl whose father is Jewish, a Protestant apostate who becomes a Catholic and a Catholic who is also a divorcee. A Scot who emigrated first to South Africa and then to Tuscany, with short stints to take up residence of sorts in America, in her own office at the New Yorker magazine… Spark doesn’t quite ‘place’ either. ‘An inveterate traveller’ writes Taylor. Not half.
I love all this split stuff. The this, and the that. The here and the there. It’s the opposite of an all-encompassing identity and sense of singular musical purpose that is a Wagner opera, for sure, but in its very shifting duality brings a unified understanding of experience nevertheless. And… nevertheless. I get that, too. The ‘nevertheless’. ‘My whole education,’ Spark wrote, ‘in and out of school, seemed even then to pivot around this word.’ More split stuff thinking, right there.
These qualities – of being both, of the known and the unknown, the familiar and also the strange and unpredictable there (those boys again, their long black wetsuit-covered bodies damp with surf, crossing the traffic in busy city streets) – are at the very centre of a good deal of what I love in literary experience. Did I just see that? Read that? Does that make sense? And while it may not sit comfortably with the rules of realism – this thing that is alive and vivid and charged with a peculiar and unnerving kind of otherness that may not conform at all to story’s rules or the prosaic requirements that seem to constitute so much fiction – it is, of course, at the very pulse of poetry. And both these writers, Mansfield and Spark, are poets at heart.
The reason I’ve been thinking about all this is because of reading The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume One, edited by Dan Gunn (Virago) and Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life by Gerri Kimber (Reaktion). They have reminded me that, though I always knew it, both writers never started out intending to write prose. Rather, it was the particular shifting, endlessly questioning kind of thinking that goes into forming a poem’s identity – along with the restless sense of self that this kind of work brings – which informs who it was they became, what they did and how they conducted their lives. For some reason – but thanks again to these recently published, very different forms of biography – this had not struck me before with quite the same force. That despite all the usually cited issues of ambiguity around their nationality and identity and so on – it’s Spark and Mansfield wanting to write poetry in the first place that makes of them so much sense. They were born in that country. That’s where they come from. They’re not natives of the prosaic at all!
These recent publications by Kimber and Gunn are helping me understand, as though for the first time, how the two writers may be unmoored from their place of origin, yes – and so with it undone from that lovely placid sense of staying put and knowing one’s place in the world – but are also both thoroughly and gorgeously grounded in the aesthetics of surprise, immediacy and the who-knows-what-next of the poem’s non sequitur and syntactical leap. As they both fill up their lives with random incident and drama (and between them, as Kimber demonstrates so imaginatively in her chapters which brim with research and new thinking, with headings such as ‘London and Europe’, ‘Death and Disillusionment’ and ‘Marriage and Discontent’, and as Gunn remarks in his introduction to the ‘bonne-vivante and grande dame of literature’, there was a great deal of filling up being done) it is in the idea of the poem’s singular reality that they come to rest. Fortune may be matched, in Mansfield’s life, by her rash hungers for experience, and in Spark’s by what Dan Gunn describes in his Introduction to the Letters as ‘an alarmingly lucid and insistent writer using ever bolder analogies as she relinquished control over her daily life and reason’, but always the prescribed sense of form and technique along with a writerly philosophy that extends way beyond the boundary of prose is fixed. ‘Where she is buried in Tuscany is the word POETA’ Gunn writes of his subject. And ‘poetic verse’, as Kimber puts it in her book (and reminded us too, in an earlier biography, of Mansfield, The Early Years1), ‘would remain a creative outlet for her’.
Now I have fully recognised this – that it was this thinking of themselves as poets first that taught these writers how to live: reading it, thinking about it, returning to the writing of it, even though both had abandoned it, just as they left their country of birth, for prose – I am starting to understand Mansfield and Spark, their life and work, in terms of a sort of double exile. It’s as though their departure from a literary form as well as from a place of birth might be seen as an aspect of sensibility that can’t help but split open their thinking and enter into the sentences, paragraphs and pages that they write. Removed from one genre they seek to make up for it in another, and in that other – that poetic and startling portrayal of subject and object that resists the steady march of explication and summary of the novel’s and story’s time signature and finale – realise a form that constitutes its own work of art.
In an earlier issue of this magazine, about the endless fascination of translation, the way it occurs in the many varied means of communication and speaking, and echoes ideas of a lost, left behind place, Peter Davidson writes of trying to answer the question, But where are you from, really? (You are from here, but not from here, he translates into Spanish.2) It sums up perfectly – that feeling of uncertainty, estrangement and doubt all mixed together in the one both asking and answering the question – a situation I encounter in people’s reactions to my own work and life. With Scotland and New Zealand, London and Wellington, and the Highlands along with the North Island Wairarapa all met together all the time in my books and life, there can be an uneasy reckoning of various places that are (to my mind) in firm relation to each other, yet also disjoined. No wonder I can’t get enough of the writing of Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield! Along with Peter Davidson and pretty much everyone else in the pages of issues 283 and 284 of PN Review… Perhaps exile is now a place we may all call home?
Because a borderless, alternative version of nationality might indeed be something to consider, not as aberration nor want, but as gain: the not fitting as being, instead, simply fitting differently, fitting new. ‘Junk modelling’, as Philip Terry put it in the same issue, having both elements of a self and a language for it joined in the same construction. In the end, both Spark and Mansfield lived far away from where they started. The Edinburgh girl died in Italy, the Wellington lassie in France. And they were far from their writerly beginnings, too, by then, with their poems left mainly behind them…but were they?
Part of deciding that your life is going to be a journey in two directions at the same time – in defiance of Robert Frost’s poem’s decision3 – is that you do indeed get to ‘travel both and be one traveller’. You are always going towards that place you will come to live in while at the same time returning in your mind to where you started, doing both, living in both, at the same time, in imagination and memory. To do that is to realise, as Mansfield and Spark did, that fiction can be freed from plot, released from the idea of story and turned over into event, something not enclosed within the sealed off chamber of demonstrated action and history but celebrated here and now in the contingent, the surprising, the ‘this’ – a quality Kimber describes in Mansfield’s own term of ‘shaking free’ and Gunn defines as Spark’s ‘objectivity… a narrator’s willingness to present the evidence without issuing judgement’.
Like surfboard riders in the middle of the city who led me round the corner from the café where I’d been sitting to a wave that tumbled out from under a bridge in a river that had all the young pharaohs borne up and for an instant poised upon it, balanced precariously like gods, before they were tossed back into its waters, so do Katherine Mansfield and Muriel Spark show me that the impossible is also happening right here in front of me. It is, this impossible of mine that is – nevertheless, and nevertheless again – 100 percent real.
Notes:
The boys’ profiles as they passed before me – elbows at an angle and their boards pointing forward, bare feet flat on the ground, heel to toe – were elongated and purposeful as the drawings of pharaohs on the walls of Egyptian tombs. Who were they? Where had they come from? Was any of this real?
These are the kinds of questions – many and varied – that come to mind when I consider the life and work of Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield. ‘Who are these people?’, V.S. Pritchett famously asked of the characters and the implied author of Mansfield’s short stories. ‘We can scarcely guess.’ It was as though anything to do with the New Zealand-born writer – those fictions of hers based on her family and upbringing in a tiny city way off in the South Pacific – only beggared belief. How could someone, who came from that far away, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, be part of any contemporary modernist literary scene, let alone the one that flourished in Bloomsbury and the salons of Lady Ottoline Morell and Virginia Woolf? ‘The inscrutable woman remains inscrutable’, Woolf wrote in her diary in 1919 – behind her, as I imagine it, those roundly herbaceous borders of her house in Sussex, all gillyflowers and sweet William and forget-me-nots. Hardly any room, in those beds, for the waving fronds of toi toi and manuka bush that would have been planted in Mansfield’s country garden. ‘Has she no home?’ asked Frank O’Conner, addressing what he called Mansfield’s ‘conscious, deliberate acts of magic’. Who is this woman? Where does she belong?
Muriel Spark invites much of the same. In the opening chapter of his warm and thoroughly considerate biography of Edinburgh’s surely most famous literary daughter, the journalist and critic Alan Taylor notes another pharaoh on the city streets. ‘Away from anywhere in which she felt constricted and obligated and misunderstood, she could work untrammelled’, he writes, in his Appointment in Arezzo. ‘No one should be deceived,’ he goes on, referring to Spark’s many decisions to change everything about the way she lived into another thing, ‘that the road had been straight and smooth.’ Here’s the Morningside girl whose father is Jewish, a Protestant apostate who becomes a Catholic and a Catholic who is also a divorcee. A Scot who emigrated first to South Africa and then to Tuscany, with short stints to take up residence of sorts in America, in her own office at the New Yorker magazine… Spark doesn’t quite ‘place’ either. ‘An inveterate traveller’ writes Taylor. Not half.
I love all this split stuff. The this, and the that. The here and the there. It’s the opposite of an all-encompassing identity and sense of singular musical purpose that is a Wagner opera, for sure, but in its very shifting duality brings a unified understanding of experience nevertheless. And… nevertheless. I get that, too. The ‘nevertheless’. ‘My whole education,’ Spark wrote, ‘in and out of school, seemed even then to pivot around this word.’ More split stuff thinking, right there.
*
These qualities – of being both, of the known and the unknown, the familiar and also the strange and unpredictable there (those boys again, their long black wetsuit-covered bodies damp with surf, crossing the traffic in busy city streets) – are at the very centre of a good deal of what I love in literary experience. Did I just see that? Read that? Does that make sense? And while it may not sit comfortably with the rules of realism – this thing that is alive and vivid and charged with a peculiar and unnerving kind of otherness that may not conform at all to story’s rules or the prosaic requirements that seem to constitute so much fiction – it is, of course, at the very pulse of poetry. And both these writers, Mansfield and Spark, are poets at heart.
The reason I’ve been thinking about all this is because of reading The Letters of Muriel Spark, Volume One, edited by Dan Gunn (Virago) and Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life by Gerri Kimber (Reaktion). They have reminded me that, though I always knew it, both writers never started out intending to write prose. Rather, it was the particular shifting, endlessly questioning kind of thinking that goes into forming a poem’s identity – along with the restless sense of self that this kind of work brings – which informs who it was they became, what they did and how they conducted their lives. For some reason – but thanks again to these recently published, very different forms of biography – this had not struck me before with quite the same force. That despite all the usually cited issues of ambiguity around their nationality and identity and so on – it’s Spark and Mansfield wanting to write poetry in the first place that makes of them so much sense. They were born in that country. That’s where they come from. They’re not natives of the prosaic at all!
These recent publications by Kimber and Gunn are helping me understand, as though for the first time, how the two writers may be unmoored from their place of origin, yes – and so with it undone from that lovely placid sense of staying put and knowing one’s place in the world – but are also both thoroughly and gorgeously grounded in the aesthetics of surprise, immediacy and the who-knows-what-next of the poem’s non sequitur and syntactical leap. As they both fill up their lives with random incident and drama (and between them, as Kimber demonstrates so imaginatively in her chapters which brim with research and new thinking, with headings such as ‘London and Europe’, ‘Death and Disillusionment’ and ‘Marriage and Discontent’, and as Gunn remarks in his introduction to the ‘bonne-vivante and grande dame of literature’, there was a great deal of filling up being done) it is in the idea of the poem’s singular reality that they come to rest. Fortune may be matched, in Mansfield’s life, by her rash hungers for experience, and in Spark’s by what Dan Gunn describes in his Introduction to the Letters as ‘an alarmingly lucid and insistent writer using ever bolder analogies as she relinquished control over her daily life and reason’, but always the prescribed sense of form and technique along with a writerly philosophy that extends way beyond the boundary of prose is fixed. ‘Where she is buried in Tuscany is the word POETA’ Gunn writes of his subject. And ‘poetic verse’, as Kimber puts it in her book (and reminded us too, in an earlier biography, of Mansfield, The Early Years1), ‘would remain a creative outlet for her’.
Now I have fully recognised this – that it was this thinking of themselves as poets first that taught these writers how to live: reading it, thinking about it, returning to the writing of it, even though both had abandoned it, just as they left their country of birth, for prose – I am starting to understand Mansfield and Spark, their life and work, in terms of a sort of double exile. It’s as though their departure from a literary form as well as from a place of birth might be seen as an aspect of sensibility that can’t help but split open their thinking and enter into the sentences, paragraphs and pages that they write. Removed from one genre they seek to make up for it in another, and in that other – that poetic and startling portrayal of subject and object that resists the steady march of explication and summary of the novel’s and story’s time signature and finale – realise a form that constitutes its own work of art.
*
In an earlier issue of this magazine, about the endless fascination of translation, the way it occurs in the many varied means of communication and speaking, and echoes ideas of a lost, left behind place, Peter Davidson writes of trying to answer the question, But where are you from, really? (You are from here, but not from here, he translates into Spanish.2) It sums up perfectly – that feeling of uncertainty, estrangement and doubt all mixed together in the one both asking and answering the question – a situation I encounter in people’s reactions to my own work and life. With Scotland and New Zealand, London and Wellington, and the Highlands along with the North Island Wairarapa all met together all the time in my books and life, there can be an uneasy reckoning of various places that are (to my mind) in firm relation to each other, yet also disjoined. No wonder I can’t get enough of the writing of Muriel Spark and Katherine Mansfield! Along with Peter Davidson and pretty much everyone else in the pages of issues 283 and 284 of PN Review… Perhaps exile is now a place we may all call home?
Because a borderless, alternative version of nationality might indeed be something to consider, not as aberration nor want, but as gain: the not fitting as being, instead, simply fitting differently, fitting new. ‘Junk modelling’, as Philip Terry put it in the same issue, having both elements of a self and a language for it joined in the same construction. In the end, both Spark and Mansfield lived far away from where they started. The Edinburgh girl died in Italy, the Wellington lassie in France. And they were far from their writerly beginnings, too, by then, with their poems left mainly behind them…but were they?
Part of deciding that your life is going to be a journey in two directions at the same time – in defiance of Robert Frost’s poem’s decision3 – is that you do indeed get to ‘travel both and be one traveller’. You are always going towards that place you will come to live in while at the same time returning in your mind to where you started, doing both, living in both, at the same time, in imagination and memory. To do that is to realise, as Mansfield and Spark did, that fiction can be freed from plot, released from the idea of story and turned over into event, something not enclosed within the sealed off chamber of demonstrated action and history but celebrated here and now in the contingent, the surprising, the ‘this’ – a quality Kimber describes in Mansfield’s own term of ‘shaking free’ and Gunn defines as Spark’s ‘objectivity… a narrator’s willingness to present the evidence without issuing judgement’.
Like surfboard riders in the middle of the city who led me round the corner from the café where I’d been sitting to a wave that tumbled out from under a bridge in a river that had all the young pharaohs borne up and for an instant poised upon it, balanced precariously like gods, before they were tossed back into its waters, so do Katherine Mansfield and Muriel Spark show me that the impossible is also happening right here in front of me. It is, this impossible of mine that is – nevertheless, and nevertheless again – 100 percent real.
Notes:
- Kimber, Gerri: Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (Edinburgh UP, 2016)
- ‘Living Between Languages’ by Peter Davidson, in PNR 283
- From ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost
This article is taken from PN Review 287, Volume 52 Number 3, January - February 2026.