Journal

In July 1942 Irne Nmirovsky, author of the now-bestselling Suite Franaise, wrote in her notebook on her last day of freedom before she was deported by the Nazis, The pine woods all around me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night's storm, as if I were on a raft, my legs tucked under me! In my bag I have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the Journal of KM and an orange.' Katherine Mansfield's Journal is one of the great classics of twentieth century literature but has not been in print for many years. Yet it is a uniquely truthful record of a great writer at work, of the spirit of a genius in the last ten years of her life, and of the development of the modern mind during the early years of the last century.Most people will have read Katherine Mansfield's stories. The Journal was compiled by her husband John Middleton Murry soon after she died and was published in 1927. It consists of fragments of diary entries, unposted letters, scraps of writing, in other words anything that was dated or could have a date attributed to it and that could be woven into a volume called a journal'.Katherine Mansfield had not thought of posterity reading anything she wrote apart from her short stories; indeed, she asked Murry to publish as little as possible'. But failure to destroy something is quite different from meaning something to be read by others; which is why Dorothy Parker said of the Journal, so private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it.' For it is indeed an intimate and self-revelatory record of a writer's mind, far more intimate, surely, than Katherine would have wanted it to be had she known it would be published.Thus, unusually for its time, the Journal is honest, sharp, tragic and over-sensitive: but a writer's sharpness and over-sensitivity, not a gossip's or a politician's or a mother's