‘Objectless Love’: The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield

This chapter maps parallels in the personal lives and literary concerns of Katherine Mansfield and Colette. Mansfield identified Colette as a kindred spirit who had very close thematic and stylistic concerns. In Colette’s novels, particularly The Vagabond, Mansfield found ‘a legitimate and desirable mode of life for a modern woman artist’ that she adopted in her writing and throughout her life. The chapter argues that Mansfield’s identification in Colette of her own struggle between romantic coupledom and the solitude and self-realisation needed to create art provided a way of understanding her own experience.