The Paper Knife – Patrick White and Katherine Mansfield

This article details the provenance of a paper knife which had belonged to Katherine Mansfield and was donated to the Alexander Turnbull Library by Patrick White. White was strongly influenced by Mansfield’s stories in his youth. While studying at Cambridge in 1932 he read Mansfield’s published letters and journals. In 1934, following a literary pilgrimage to Zennor, White had poems accepted by the London Mercury which had published Mansfield and Lawrence. In 1961 White visited his cousin Peggy Garland in Wellington and was introduced to her lodger, Mansfield’s biographer Antony Alpers. Alpers drove White around some of the settings of Mansfield’s Wellington stories and White visited the Alexander Turnbull Library where he examined Mansfield’s manuscript letters and journals. Alpers gave White Mansfield’s greenstone-handled and silver paper knife which had been given to him by Ida Baker. In 1972 White donated the paper knife to the Alexander Turnbull Library. In 1976 White and his partner Manoly Lascaris visited Katherine Mansfield Fellow Michael King at the Villa Isola Bella in Menton. White wrote an endorsement for the dust jacket of Viking Press’s 1980 edition of Alpers’ The Life of Katherine Mansfield.