Katherine embraced her sexuality and bohemian tendencies, while Virginia shied away from intimacy. Katherine was six years younger than Virginia and had a colonial background in New Zealand, while Virginia’s family was firmly entrenched in the English upper-middle classes. Katherine pleaded with him to introduce her to Virginia, saying that she wanted to meet the author more than anyone else, and Lytton passed this along to Virginia - along with a rather mean description of Katherine’s “ugly impressive mask of a face - cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart, and a sharp and slightly vulgarly-fanciful intellect sitting behind it.”Īt first glance, the two women were an unlikely pair of friends. He had met Katherine at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, during a literary salon held by English aristocrat Lady Ottoline Morrell. Virginia and Katherine had heard of each other long before they met, and were eventually introduced in February 1917 by Lytton Strachey, Virginia’s fellow Bloomsbury writer and friend. According to Virginia Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee, it was a friendship that was “intimate but guarded, mutually inspiring but competitive.” It was based on admiration, rivalry, envy, and respect, and would continue to affect Virginia long after Katherine’s death in 1923. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship.”ĭespite the snobbishness and rancor of this entry, the two women formed a friendship that would be incredibly important to both, especially from 1917 to 1920. “In truth, I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight lines so hard & cheap. Katherine “stinks like a civet cat that had taken to street walking,” she wrote. In October 1917, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary her first, decidedly mixed impressions of fellow writer Katherine Mansfield.
The only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Virginia said of Katherine, “I was jealous of her writing. The rivalry between the two brilliant writers served as inspiration to both, a spur to do better. Literary mythology has often portrayed Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as bitter rivals, but they were close friends and, for the most part, mutually supportive writing colleagues.
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