Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
chere are writers of the past that I would have liked to know out of intellectual curiosity, others who, even if they came back to life, I wouldn’t exchange a single word with but still others who I would have really liked to have as friends.
It certainly falls into the latter category Katherine Mansfield, an extraordinary and eccentric girl with a great talent not only in writing but above all in the art of living. Unfortunately fate was cruel to this young New Zealander, the only one Virginia Woolf was jealous of, considering her style modern and refined, and for this very reason she had decided to publish it with her publishing house founded with her husband Leonard.
Katherine Mansfield has had little time to put her great talent to the test. Because of a relentless disease, tuberculosis, she had to leave the life she loved so much at just 35; but she has burned the days without ever stopping, continuing to write to the end and leaving a luminous trail of books that continue to give us pleasure, reflections, disturbances and joy.
This year we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his deatha century has passed but Mansfield’s writing remains current and attractive and I invite you to immerse yourself in his stories by choosing at random from the titles of a production that will never disappoint you.
Irregular, nomadic, rebellious and ironic KM, as she liked to sign herself so as not to waste time and dedicate it to more pleasant activities, I met her late, thanks to a passionate book that Feltrinelli publishes in a new edition on the occasion of the centenary of her death.
“The daughter of the sun. Ardent life of Katherine Mansfield” by Nadia Fusini (Feltrinelli).
It’s about The daughter of the sun. Burning life of Katherine Mansfield by Nadia Fusini, writer, literary critic and translator who has always helped us to love authors and authors; not only through her renowned essays but also choosing, as in this case, a fictional form that stages KM’s whole life through the dialogues of a brother and sister, igniting the curiosity of those who have not yet discovered it.
Francis and Zoe, as the protagonists are called – borrowing the names of Salinger’s characters – intertwine their conversations in the bucolic atmosphere of a country house where Francis has retired precisely to write a story about Mansfield and Zoe who still she doesn’t know her, she immediately catches fire, and we with her. An opportunity not to be missed.
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