In this episode, we are delighted to interview Dr Gerri Kimber who is a world authority on Katherine Mansfield, a central figure in literary modernism. Gerri is the author of a brand new biography - Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, now available from Reaktion Press.

This episode focuses on Huxley’s early years as a writer. While most people are more familiar with his later novels, such as Brave New World, his earlier works remain less explored, and perhaps less valued. This discussion aims to shed a little more life on Huxley’s early writing and his relationship with Katherine Mansfield and the Garsington Set.

In 1917 at Garsington Manor the young Aldous Huxley, met Mansfield, a tantalising New Zealander who wore scarlet stockings, sported fashionable short hair and wore French perfume unlike the rest of the Blooms Berries (as she named them). Virginia Woolf called her common. In fact, Mansfield was the daughter of the Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand, educated at Queen’s College London, and as we learn in this podcast, had lived an astonishingly racy life before meeting John Middleton Murry.

The interview in this episode paints a picture of the world that Huxley and Mansfield co-inhabited and explores the friendship that might have been. Both were acute observers of human nature, socially aware, and psychologically sophisticated modernists. Huxley immortalized Mansfield in his early novel as part of the inspiration for Anne in Crome Yellow and the self-conscious Mary Thriplow in Those Barren Leaves. For her part, Mansfield captured Huxley in her story “Bliss” as the affected, dandyish Eddie Warren with his “strange accent on certain syllables.”

In 1918, facing serious health problems, Mansfield married John Middleton Murry. Gerri Kimber is blunt: “He was the worst possible man she could have married.” When Murry became editor of The Athenaeum in 1919 and hired Huxley as a subeditor, Huxley saw through him immediately. The friendship with Mansfield collapsed as collateral damage. By 1920, she was calling Huxley’s work “bilge” in capital letters. In 1922 she refused to read Crome Yellow: “The idea bores me so terribly.”

After Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis in 1923, Murry launched what might be seen as “the Mansfield cult”—publishing her posthumous writings and writing poems about her. By the 1930s, Murry was “the most hated man in English letters.” Huxley took revenge on Murry depicting him as the odious Dennis Burlap in Point Counter Point, a manipulative editor with a dead wife named Susan, whom he canonizes to boost his own cultural image, exploiting her suffering, sentimentalizing her pain.

Alongside Gerri’s scintillating interview, in its ‘aphorisms’ segment the episode picks out a sentence offered by the garrulous philosopher Mr. Scogan in Crome Yellow: ‘One is also alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world’. We also turn to the ways in which depiction of the emptiness of Mrs Viveash’s experiences of leisure in the postwar London of Antic Hay anticipates the sophisticated critique of consumer culture. Here are the links to the works discussed in this episode:

By Katherine Mansfield:

* Bliss and Other Stories (1920) - Collection including “Bliss” featuring Huxley as Eddie Warren

* The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) - Her most famous collection

By Aldous Huxley:

* Limbo (1920) - First collection of short stories that Mansfield reviewed harshly

* Crome Yellow (1921) - First novel, set at Garsington, featuring Mansfield-inspired character

* Those Barren Leaves (1925) - Features Mary Thriplow, based on Mansfield

* Along the Road (1925) - Essay collection with critical assessment of Mansfield’s work

* Point Counter Point (1928) - Features Dennis Burlap, a portrait of Murry

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