Katherine Mansfield, Nettie Palmer and Critical Influence

This chapter traces the lodestar role that Katherine Mansfield played for the Australian literary critic Nettie Palmer. Palmer’s literary archive reveals her enchantment with Mansfield as a reader, writer and literary journalist, highlighting the impact of Mansfield’s posthumously published personal writing on her. Mansfield’s presence in Palmer’s archive exposes a thread of literary influence between literary critics and, through Palmer, to an even wider network of literary correspondents. In Palmer’s reviews, letters and notebooks Mansfield alters, chameleon-like, to fit her purpose: the successful colonial writer in exile, the mourned absent contemporary and the incisive literary critic who prompts Palmer to reflect on her own professional writing.