The Dove's Nest

In a world that had just emerged from the furnace of the First World War and returned to explore literature and the raw language of the self, Katherine Mansfield knew how to unleash a prose that was at once severe and tender, and how to make her readers and critics discover the intimate relationship between her characters and her own life. In a world where evil, to her, seemed to lurk everywhere, quiet and waiting, needing only a little dust to be stirred so that it might rise up, screaming and active, within the soul, Mansfield's writing was nothing but a constant, harsh struggle against that evil. It was a struggle that led the writer, in her final years, after she withdrew to live south of Paris, to join a creative community founded on the search for the costly humanity of goodness through literary and artistic expression. The sharp contradiction between the ascetic life of that community and the clamor of the capitals her stories depicted clearly hastened her departure, and her lack of resistance to the will of fate.