David Eggleton
Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station by Redmer Yska (Otago University Press, 2023), 272pp, $50
Was Katherine Mansfield a poster child for every kind of wild? If each generation seeks to define Mansfield anew, and every interpreter has their own Mansfield in mind, Redmer Yska in Katherine Mansfield’s Europe: Station to Station chooses to emphasise Mansfield as a wild colonial girl, a bohemian, an instinctive rebel—a proto-punk who dabbled in drugs, carried a pistol for self-protection and spent her last days on a commune guided by a Russian guru, all the while writing the incandescent prose that has made her a literary immortal. [Read more…]