\u00c0 l\u2019occasion du festival online Katherine Mansfield : International KM100NZ, 17-19 novembre 2023, pour c\u00e9l\u00e9brer le centenaire de la mort de l\u2019auteure, la SEW a adress\u00e9 aux participants le message suivant :<\/p>\n
On 9 January 2023, a public event was held at the Katherine Mansfield Memorial in the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park in Thorndon, Wellington, to mark the anniversary date of the centenary of Katherine Mansfield’s death. On Saturday 14 January, a special gathering was held at the grave of Katherine Mansfield in the cemetery at ‘Avon, France, to mark the centenary of her death. The ceremony was attended by dignitaries including the Mayor of Avon and New Zealand’s Ambassador to France, her Excellency Caroline Bilkey. Anne Besnault, senior lecturer at the University of Rouen Normandy and Vice-president of the French Woolf Society (Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019\u00c9tudes Woolfiennes) gave a talk on Mansfield’s life and work to a full room at the Avon Library. Just over a month later, France’s Ambassador to New Zealand, Madame Laurence Beau hosted a reception at the French Residence in Thorndon to mark the centenary year of Katherine Mansfield’s death and the special literary connection between France and New Zealand. More recently, on 12 October 2023, the France\u2013New Zealand Association celebrated the indomitable life and innovative writing of Katherine with an evening of talks, poetry, and music \u2013 including a world premi\u00e8re \u2013 at Reid Hall, Paris 6. This is an ongoing story, just as the different, yet equally powerful story of Virginia Woolf and France is an ongoing one.<\/p>\n
Strikingly, one of the most well-known Katherine Mansfield Scholars \u2013 Professor Claire Davison \u2013 was the President of the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d\u2019\u00c9tudes Woolfiennes between 2010-2016. Ever since it was founded by Christine Reynier in 1996, the SEW has been working to promote the study of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Circle in France, and to further links between Woolf scholars in France and their counterparts abroad. Although only a small society, the dedication of its founding and more recent members has enabled it to make its mark in French academic circles and beyond. Over the past 20 years international conferences have been held at Cerisy, Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence, Rouen-Normandie, Saint Etienne and the books or journal issues emerging from these encounters attest to the richness and diversity of Woolf studies in France. Let us also recall the way many of the SEW\u2019s members have worked on Katherine Mansfield\u2019s work\/fiction: Marie All\u00e8gre, Anne Besnault, Ad\u00e8le Cassigneul, Claire Davison, Anne- Marie Di Biasio, Marie-Dominique Garnier, Elsa H\u00f6gberg, Monica Latham, Nathalie Pavec, Luca PInelli, Floriane Reviron-Pi\u00e9gay, Christine Reynier, to name but some of them.<\/p>\n
Whether they address Mansfield\u2019s and Woolf\u2019s singular modernism and feminism; art of fiction and the short story; predecessors and followers; psychoanalytical reception; relationship to lost brothers, questions of class, gender, history and empire, these researchers are well aware that beyond the \u201crivalry\u201d between the two writers and beyond their differences in terms of origins, class, personality, what Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf shared was a joyful, yet at times painful, passion for writing, a commitment to the intellectual andpolitical questions of their time, a sense that as women artists, they needed each other, just as they needed to fight for recognition in a still patriarchal world.<\/p>\n
Some final words to conclude this short greetings message from our society to yours: quotations from the opening to \u201cAt the Bay\u201d and The Waves, then \u201cThe Garden Party\u201d and Mrs Dalloway to suggest how more work needs to be done on the relationship between these two \u201cindomitable\u201d figures of modernism:<\/p>\n
\u201cVery early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. [\u2026] A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue.\u00a0\u00bb (\u201cAt the Bay\u201d, 1922)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.\u201d (The Waves, 1931)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer\u201d (\u201cThe Garden Party\u201d, 1922).<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat a morning\u2014fresh as if issued to children on a beach \u2026 How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning\u201d (Mrs Dalloway, 1925)<\/p>\n
14\/11\/2023
\nAnne Besnault & Anne-Marie Di Biasio
\nFor the SEW<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00c0 l\u2019occasion du festival online Katherine Mansfield : International KM100NZ, 17-19 novembre 2023, pour c\u00e9l\u00e9brer le centenaire de la mort de l\u2019auteure, la SEW a adress\u00e9 aux participants le message suivant : On 9 January 2023, a public event was held at the Katherine Mansfield Memorial in the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park in Thorndon, Wellington, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evenements-modernisme"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3919"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4078,"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions\/4078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/etudes-woolfiennes.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}