VOLUME 18 of Katherine Mansfield Studies: Katherine Mansfield's Men
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 18 OF
Katherine Mansfield Studies
THE PEER-REVIEWED YEARBOOK OF THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY
PUBLISHED BY EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
on the theme of
KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S MEN
Editors
Dr Erika Baldt and Dr Gerri Kimber
Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2025
‘Everything must ring like elizabethan english and like those gentlemen I always seem to be
mentioning ‘the Poets’. There is a light upon them especially upon the elizabethans and our
‘special’ set – Keats, W.W. Coleridge Shelley De Quincey and Co. […] Those are the people
with whom I want to live – those are the men I feel are our brothers’. (Letter to John
Middleton Murry, 4–5 March 1918)
‘These dark young men – so proud of their plumes and their black and silver cloaks and ever
so expensive pompes funebres – Ive no patience’. (Letter to Virginia Woolf, 12 May 1919)
The editors of Katherine Mansfield Studies invite contributions to volume 18, to be published
in 2026, that explore any aspect of the theme of this volume: Katherine Mansfield’s Men.
Mansfield’s career was in many ways shaped by men, from literary heroes such as Wilde and
Chekhov whom she mimicked as she found her own voice, to editors such as A. R. Orage
and John Middleton Murry, who provided her with early publishing opportunities. Her
personal life, too, was coloured by intense identification with male counterparts like Murry
and her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp, whose death in the Great War marked a turning
point in Mansfield’s career, as she claimed: ‘every word I write & every place I visit I carry
you with me’ (CW4, p. 204). At the same time, however, Mansfield was sceptical of many of
her male contemporaries, being unable to see, for example, as Lawrence did, ‘sex in trees, sex
in the running brooks, sex in stones & sex in everything’, as she confided to Beatrice
Campbell (4 May 1916). In fact, according to Claire Harman, ‘Mansfield’s kind of modernism
was always significantly different from her contemporaries Joyce, Eliot and Pound, and her
development was more organic, and personal’ (Harman, All Sorts of Lives, London: Chatto &
Windus, 2023, p. 216). The aim of this volume will be to explore how Mansfield forged her
identity as a woman and as a writer, in relation to the men in her life.
Subjects might include (but are not limited to):
• Men in Mansfield’s fiction
• Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
• Mansfield and Gurdjieff
• Mansfield’s familial relationships with men, such as Harold Beauchamp and Leslie
Beauchamp
• Mansfield’s relationships with other men such as D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley,
T. S. Eliot, J. D. Fergusson, Francis Carco, George Bowden, etc.
• Mansfield’s working partnerships: Murry, A. R. Orage, S. S. Koteliansky
• Mansfield and her [male] literary heroes: Chekhov, Dickens, Wilde, etc.
• Mansfield and the [male] musical world
• Mansfield and the [male] medical establishment
• Mansfield and World War I
• Mansfield and the modernist canon
• Gender performance in Mansfield’s fiction
• Gendered critical reception of Mansfield’s work
Please email submissions of 5000-6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in
Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt, Times New Roman, double line-spaced, with a
100 word abstract + 5 keywords & 50-word biography, to the editorial team at
kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
PLEASE NOTE: ALL SUBMISSIONS WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE ENTERED FOR OUR
ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION, UNLESS AUTHORS INDICATE OTHERWISE.
*An MHRA Style Guide is available on the Katherine Mansfield Society website:
http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-st...
CREATIVE WRITING
We welcome creative submissions – poetry, short stories, creative essays, on the
general theme of Katherine Mansfield. Please send submissions, accompanied by a
brief (50 words) biography, to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.