The Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield

Description

Katherine Mansfield filled the first half of her '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 life at the time, and her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a 19-year-old still living in the colony. This publication is the first scholarly edition of the 'Urewera Notebook'. It provides 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.

Anna Plumridge is a postgraduate student at Victoria University of Wellington. She has a particular interest in Modernist literature, the literature of Empire and paleography. Anna tutors in New Zealand literature and editing manuscripts as part of a project on The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing.

The quality of the proposal is exemplary ... The editing is impressive and the editor's approach imaginative as well as scholarly. - Vincent O'Sullivan