Sense of Echo

Abstract Virginia Woolf’s phrase ‘the queerest sense of echo’ used to describe her relationship with Katherine Mansfield indicates her own awareness of recognising Mansfield as the foreigner within, other but familiar, both frightening in her alien similarity and reassuring in her capacity to understand a shared obsession with writing. What Ann L. McLaughlin describes as an ‘uneasy sisterhood’ is acknowledged in June 1920 when Woolf remarks of her friendship with Mansfield that ‘this fragmentary intermittent intercourse of mine seems more fundamental than many better established ones’. It predates Woolf’s relationship with another writer, Vita Sackville-West, and was intellectually and artistically more significant for Woolf: its centrality becomes evident to the reader of the personal writings of both women. This chapter discusses the danger to Mansfield’s and Woolf’s vulnerable sensibilities in the process of exploration, and of their dependence on literary husbands and canonical fathers. It examines the two women’s preoccupation with childhood, time, and memory.