MANSFIELD VAGARIES
There’s not much I can offer to placate Gerri Kimber
( Letters, January 14) for not admiring her recent The Early Years of Katherine Mansfield, a biography that in my view is without the discrimination or tact a writer of Mansfield’s finesse demands. But may I cite reasons for why I questioned her not acknowledging in the book what seemed derived from historian Redmer Yska, or mentioning him among her sources.
In the Dominion Post of December 18, 2014, Yska presented evidence for the first time that the Beauchamp family moved to Wellington’s Karori to avoid the severe health hazards of Thorndon, after Mansfield’s younger sister, Gwen, died from cholera.
As he points out, her father, Harold Beauchamp, later wrote more generally in his Reminiscences and Recollections that the move “was for the benefit of his children’s health”.
Kimber, on page 25 of her book, notes, too, that after Gwen’s death from cholera,
“it must have been at the forefront of Harold’s mind when he decided to move the family completely away from Wellington. As he noted in his Reminiscences, the move was ‘for the benefit, not only of the children’s health but also of my own’.”
In the August 3, 2013, Dominion Post, Yska also wrote about the massive upgrade to Wellington’s sewage system while the Beauchamps were in Karori, how this diminished contagious disease, and led to the family’s return to the city. Page 59 of Kimber’s book covers the same ground, in not dissimilar language. On page 66, she links Wellington’s epidemics with the children in The Doll’s House being instructed to keep their distance from the “untouchable” daughters of the washerwoman – a point precisely made in Yska’s article. A note in the Dominion Post that same day quotes Professor Jane
Stafford, of Victoria University, saying no scholar before Yska had joined the dots in quite this way.
I did not imply plagiarism, which Kimber suggests could be inferred. Not at all. I would settle for the sometimes unexpected vagaries of research. Vincent O’Sullivan (Wellington)