Katherine Mansfield and Her ‘stray dog’

Abstract This chapter explores the writings and inner turmoil of Katherine Mansfield’s life in the context of her illness and her resolute quest for a cure. Her voluminous correspondence offers extraordinarily detailed insight into the frustrations and emotional travails of an invalid life, as well as the forms of medical treatment on offer, from the respectable to the highly questionable. The chapter considers the highly charged relationship between invalid and carer, as played out in Mansfield’s volatile relationship with her friend Ida Baker, and also analyses a novel of sanatorium life by R. O. Prowse, A Gift of the Dusk, which had a profound impact on Mansfield. Although much has been written on Mansfield’s embrace at the end of her life of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, little attention has been paid to the other forms of treatment she tried, from radiation to autosuggestion, and her interactions with a whole string of doctors, including her beloved Dr Sorapure. As she moved from place to place, and from Menton to Montana in the Swiss mountains, Mansfield continued writing determinedly every day, despite her haemorrhages and exhaustion, producing some of her very best work. By placing these stories in their immediate medical context, the chapter offers new readings of some of Mansfield’s most famous stories, including ‘Miss Brill’ and ‘The Fly’.