The After-Dinner Payback

Ali Smith pays tribute to the “awesome spirit” of Katherine Mansfield, who lived fast, died young, and left behind a literary legacy that influenced a generation of writers, including T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Mansfield’s talent for social doubleness was little appreciated in the hothouse smallness of literary London. Lady Ottoline Morrell had begun to find her far too disquieting. The Bloomsbury Group agreed—she wore a mask, she was vulgar, she dealt in “lies and poses,” she was “inscrutable.”

“Indeed, everyone who was anyone put her down—Wyndham Lewis, Bertrand Russell, Gaudier-Brzeska—the list is endless … one wonders … why someone so gifted, so charming, should have been so universally detested,” Angela Carter later wrote.