“LFriendship between women interests me” he wrote Virginia Woolf in his diary on November 28, 1919. As interested in another great writer of the first half of the twentieth century, Catherine Mansfielda New Zealander transplanted to Europe, who died on 9 January one hundred years ago at the age of 32, who defined friendship as an adventure, also asking himself: “But do we agree on the meaning of the word adventure?”.
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Getty Images).
No rivalry
It is no coincidence that Sara De Simone has chosen these two quotations as an exergue of None like her. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Story of a friendshipfascinating and highly documented essay which, also through texts not yet translated in Italy, puts the relationship between two central authors of the twentieth-century canon in the right perspective, a relationship in the vulgate erroneously classified under the heading “rivalry”. A work that mixes scientific rigor and narrative passion because on the one hand De Simone had many letters at his disposal (those from Katherine, kept by Virginia), on the other very few (Mansfield was in the habit of burning all the correspondence)scarcity which he remedied by cross-referencing documents and correspondence of other protagonists of those years.
It wasn’t love at first sight
Woolf and Mansfield met in 1917 in London thanks to Lytton Strachey, a great friend of Virginia in Bloomsbury club: the first meeting in truth, De Simone points out, is not love at first sight. “It was a progressive approach. By the end of the year Katherine was in the same circles as Virginia, and was the center of attention of most of her acquaintances and friends “to the point that she will become the first author printed by Hogarth Press, the publishing brand founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. The two are actually very different, starting from the physical traits, from the relationship with one’s body and with eros, from acquaintances: Katherine comes from the colonies, has a wild life, is found at certain times to freely frequent the slums of society and feels observed and judged by the English intellectuality that Virginia represents in the highest degree.
The experience of the disease
However, they have a lot in common, starting with their artistic and cultural interests. Both, De Simone recounts, have a daily relationship with illness and physical suffering: from her youth Virginia had mental breakdowns that forced her to stay in bed (she committed suicide in 1941 at the age of 59), while Katherine, even before the tuberculosis that will cause death, suffers from various juvenile ailments. Nevertheless None like her dispels that depressive and tragic pall that has long weighed on the two to highlight, of both, the great strength of mind, the irony, the ability to laugh at others and at oneself, that vital, creative force which is translated into putting writing first. «And this – says De Simone – was not an affinity like any other: it was everything. Like participating in a secret ritual, walking on the same clods of incandescent earth, where no one else dared to venture».
Literary Experimenters
Virginia Woolf (Getty Images).
«Finally the image, a bit banal and rooted in the imagination, of two female writers who have looked at each other from afar, jealous, rivals, to focus attention on the relationship between two great and important women, each extraordinary in itself and for himself» says Liliana Rampelloessayist and literary critic who has dedicated several books to the Bloomsbury writer, including Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries (The Assayer). «Authors who walk on the same ground of literary research and experimentation, who face the radical renewal of the fictional structures that characterizes those years and which sees authors such as Proust and Joyce as protagonists».
There is no doubt that there was envy and jealousy and De Simone demonstrates this amply through his letters and diaries. «But the interesting thing – continues Rampello – is that finally it is clearly seen that one has understood the importance of the other for their own research. We discover two women who have spent much more time together than we thought, who have crossed blades and in the end have built a relationship among the most significant in the history of literature.
A model for today
Katherine Mansfield (Getty Images).
Once the dust has been cleared, the relationship between the two writers emerges as a model for today, says Liliana Rampello: «To understand what it means to be two, to go into the world with the leverage of another woman who admires us and gives us the necessary support. This ability to look at the other stands out, not to feel alone, to rely on a feeling of recognition, what De Simone calls a suspended echo. And when admiration among women replaces envy it is a very important victory for each of us. This is the fruit of Sara De Simone’s extraordinary research, but also of a legacy that she has collected, of a job done in the last fifty years that now a fresher and new look lets us see in the right light ».
Admire the outsiders
It was known that Woolf had always admired outsider women like her, who did not enter the male world with their heads down, and the relationship with Mansfield is consistent with this attitude. The profound reality of their bond comes from “stale narratives for which relationships between women are either an idyllic sisterhood or poisonous competition” says De Simone, who did not build holy pictures or idealized figurines. “They both had major flaws. There are also very negative judgments in the texts of both which have allowed an arbitrary extrapolation to build a rivalry which, above all to a certain male gaze, is convenient» continues Rampello.
Now what one can imagine is in a scene which, as De Simone concludes in the book, too often does not figure in the history of literature: «That of two women – two writers – who are in a room, and talk about their own books, and those of others, and laugh, and agree, and disagree, and look into each other’s eyes, and fear, and admire. And they are friends.”
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