Beatrice Hastings in Paris

This article examines the life and work of the elusive modernist writer Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield’s sometime friend, mentor and rival. Frequently, Hastings has been misrepresented or marginalised in accounts of the period. When we turn to the writings she produced when in Paris from 1914, however, Hastings emerges as a central, noteworthy figure in the avant-garde art scene during and immediately after the ‘crisis’ years of the First World War. This article considers the autobiographical ‘Impressions of Paris’ that Hastings published from 1914 in the British periodical The New Age, the surrealist novella that she recited in 1916 at a literary and musical matinee organised by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the hospital diary composed in 1920 in which she recounts details of her turbulent love affair with Amedeo Modigliani.