Description

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An authoritative scholarly edition of Mansfield's camping journal, offering new understandings of her colonial life

Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of the Urewera Notebook during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a nineteen year old still living in the colony. This publication is theirst scholarly edition of the Urewera Notebook, providing an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield's happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland.

Key Features:

• A new, more accurate transcription of the notebook
• Textual notes provide significant variant readings from other extant editions of the notebook
• An introductory essay draws on important new developments in New Zealand literary criticism, advances in historiography of the period and legal history
• Includes a route map, revised itinerary and authoritative annotation for the text
• Includes 20 photographs, many previously unpublished, from Beauchamp family photograph albums at the Alexander Turnbull Library and Ebbett Papers at the Hawke's Bay Museum

About the Author

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Anna Plumridge is a postgraduate student at Victoria University of Wellington and the Editorial Assistant for the Edinburgh University Press Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, volumes 3 & 4.