The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives

Chapter 4 examines the posthumous publication of Mansfield’s writings in John Middleton Murry’s magazine The Adelphi. The chapter interrogates the ways in which Mansfield’s reputation was moulded and mediated in the magazine, with Murry eliding those disruptive and disjunctive aspects of Mansfield’s work examined in the first three chapters of the book: of Mansfield the feminist, who eschewed gender stereotypes of feminine ‘purity’ and ‘saintliness’ in The New Age; of Mansfield the (post)colonial writer, who negotiated a deliberately ambiguous position for her work between England and New Zealand in Rhythm; and of Mansfield the modernist, whose critical writings in The Athenaeum indubitably helped to shape the literary innovations of the early 1920s. In this way, the chapter shows how the so-called ‘Mansfield myth’ owed much to the periodical contexts in which it was first formulated.