Writer Bill Direen presented the following paper at a conference on Katherine Mansfield in Menton, France earlier this year.

Alfred Orage was Katherine Mansfield’s principal mentor in the craft of writing. When they first met, as early as 1910, Orage had been editing The New Age for three years, and with his help she rented a 2-roomed flat in Chelsea. Orage and the writer Beatrice Hastings had to be “cruel to be kind” to Mansfield, but she responded well to their harsh treatment. Orage’s influence endured right up to the time of her death.

In 1914, Orage met the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspenski, who was to have a big influence on both Orage’s and Mansfield’s philosophies of art and life; at the same time, the translation of Russian authors into English was in full swing. John Middleton Murry and Samuel Solomonovich Koteliansky were working on Chekhov’s The Bet & Other Stories (1915), Murry would publish an introduction to Dostoevski in 1916, Koteliansky worked with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Murry, Gilbert Cannan and Mansfield herself to collaborate on and perfect his translations of Russian authors. The race was on for publication. Constance Garnett would “pip” Koteliansky and Mansfield’s translation of Chekhov’s letters “at the post” in 1920 — a big disappointment to both ‘Kot’ and to Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield was reading Russian literature, and even dreaming of it, from 1907 to 1922.

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