MANSFIELD, Katherine. The Aloe.

MANSFIELD, Katherine. The Aloe.Uncanny Aloe MANSFIELD, Katherine. The Aloe. London: Constable and Co. 1930. 8vo. Publishers brown buckram, spine and upper board lettered in gilt, in the original tan dust jacket printed in dark brown, unclipped (priced 15 net to front flap), top edge gilt, the others uncut; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 162, [2 (colophon, blank); red woodcut initials; a short closed tear to foot of spine (repaired with adhesive to interior of spine), small loss to jacket at

Uncanny Aloe

MANSFIELD, Katherine. The Aloe. London: Constable and Co. 1930.

8vo. Publisher’s brown buckram, spine and upper board lettered in gilt, in the original tan dust-jacket printed in dark brown, unclipped (priced 15/- net to front flap), top-edge gilt, the others uncut; pp. vii, [1 (blank)], 162, [2 (colophon, blank); red woodcut initials; a short closed tear to foot of spine (repaired with adhesive to interior of spine), small loss to jacket at head of spine (with resultant light sunning to small portion of buckram) and short closed tear to rear cover; else a near-fine copy, uncut and unopened.

First edition, one of 750 copies, of Mansfield’s ‘first great New Zealand story’ (Bennett), drawing on her childhood memories of her country house at Karori.

The Aloe, published seven years after Mansfield’s (née Beauchamp, 1888–1923) death, is the full version of the short story ‘The Prelude’, published in 1918 by the newly established Hogarth Press at the suggestion of Virginia Woolf. ‘There were tensions and jealousies between the two women, but Virginia Woolf entertained her and visited her, and in her diaries showed the value she placed on their meetings: 'to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here' (Diary of Virginia Woolf, 45). Again, Woolf wrote that she got 'the queerest sense of an echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I've spoken' (ibid., 61)’ (ODNB).

The Aloe is based largely on the family’s 1893 move, when Mansfield was five years old, from Wellington to the country suburb of Karori; at the centre of the work stands the unsettling and uncanny ‘image of the aloe, one of the strange new plants that Kezia comes across as she wanders in the family’s new garden […] The aloe appears elsewhere in Mansfield’s work, but a comment from Walter Pater’s chapter on “The Poetry of Michelangelo” in The Renaissance seems to suggest that the plant had a literary as well as a personal resonance for Mansfield: “A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe”, remarks Pater, “is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable”’ (ibid., p. 57). The Beauchamps returned to Wellington in 1898, where Mansfield studied at Miss Swainson’s school; in 1903 she began studying at Queen’s College in London, the first girls’ school to be granted a Royal Charter and the first educational establishment in Britain to grant academic qualifications to women.

Kirkpatrick A11a. See Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (2004); Coad, ‘Lesbian Undertones in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories’, in Literature and Homosexuality (2021).

SKU: 2123121