Katherine Mansfield

Herbert Ernest Bates, (1905–74), better known as H. E. Bates, was an English writer and author. His best-known works include Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May, and My Uncle Silas.

Bates was born on May 16, 1905 in Rushden, Northamptonshire, and educated at Kettering Grammar School. After leaving school, he worked as a reporter and a warehouse clerk.

Many of his stories depict life in the rural Midlands of England, particularly his native Northamptonshire. Bates was partial to taking long midnight walks around the Northamptonshire countryside and this often provided the inspiration for his stories. Bates was a great lover of the countryside and the people,

He discarded his first novel, written when he was in his late teens, but his second, and the first one to be published, The Two Sisters, was inspired by one of his midnight walks, which took him to the small village of Farndish. There, late at night, he saw a light burning in a cottage window and it was this that triggered the story. At this time he was working briefly for the local newspaper in Wellingborough, a job which he hated, and then later at a local shoe-making warehouse, where he had time to write; in fact the whole of this first novel was written there. This was sent to, and rejected by, nine publishers, until the tenth, Jonathan Cape accepted it on the advice of its highly respected Reader, Edward Garnett. He was then twenty years old.

During World War II he was commissioned into the RAF solely to write short stories. The Air Ministry realised that the populace was less concerned with facts and figures about the war than it was with reading about those who were fighting it. The stories were originally published in the News Chronicle under the pseudonym of “Flying Officer X”. Later they were published in book form as The Greatest People in the World and How Sleep the Brave. Other novels followed after the war; in fact he averaged one novel and a collection of short stories a year, a prodigious feat. These included The Feast of July and Love for Lydia. His most popular creation, however, was the Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May. Pop Larkin and his family were inspired by a colourful character seen in a local shop in Kent by Bates and his family when on holiday. The TV series, produced after his death by his son Richard and based on these stories.. Many other stories were adapted to TV and others to films, the most renowned

In 1931, he married Madge Cox, his sweetheart from the next road in his native Rushden. They moved to the village of Little Chart in Kentand bought an old granary and this together with an acre of garden they converted into a home. Bates was a keen and knowledgeable gardener and wrote many books on flowers.

Bates died on 29 January 1974. A prolific and successful author in his own lifetime, his greatest success was however posthumous, with the television adaptations of his stories The Darling Buds of May and its sequels, My Uncle Silas and Love for Lydia

Doris May Lessing; born 22 October 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos.

Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Lessing was the eleventh woman and the oldest ever person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Times ranked her fifth on a list of " The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Lessing was born in Iran, on 22 October 1919, to Captain Alfred Tayler and Emily Maude Tayle, who were both English and of British nationality.^[6] Her father, who had lost a leg during his service in World War I, met his future wife, a nurse, at the Royal Free Hospital where he was recovering from his amputation. Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic conventall-girls school in Salisbury. She left school at the age of 14, and was self-educated from there on; she left home at 15 and worked as a nursemaid. She started reading material on politics and sociology that her employer gave her, ^[8] and began writing around this time. Following her first divorce, Lessing's interest was drawn to the popular community of the communist book club which she had joined the year before.

Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for many years.She moved to London with her youngest son in 1949. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published in 1950.Her breakthrough work, The Golden Notebook, was written in 1962. In 1984, Doris Lessing attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to show the difficulty new authors faced in trying to have their works in print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but was later accepted by another English publisher. The Diary of a Good Neighbour ^[ was published in England and the US in 1983, In 2007, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.She was 87, making her the oldest winner of the literature prize at the time of the award and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category. Lessing's fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases: the Communist theme (1944–1956), when she was writing radically on social issues (to which she returned in The Good Terrorist [1985]), the psychological theme (1956–1969), and after that the Sufi theme, which was explored in the Canopus in Argos sequence of science fiction (or as she preferred to put it " space fiction") novels and novellas. Lessing's Canopus sequence was not popular with many mainstream literary critics. Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook is considered a feminist classic by some scholars^], Lessing does not like the idea of being pigeonholed as a feminist author. When asked why, she explained: What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, 'Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.' Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I've come with great regret to this conclusion.

Katherine Mansfield

Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. The daughter of a banker in a middle-class colonial family, she was a cousin of author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother, born in 1894.^[1] Her father, Harold Beauchamp, became the chairman of theBank of New Zealand and was knighted.^[2][3] Her grandfather was Arthur Beauchamp, who briefly represented the Picton electorate in Parliament.^[3][4] The Mansfield family moved fromThorndon to Karori in 1893, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood; she used her memories of this time as an inspiration for the " Prelude" story.^[2]

Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington proper in 1898), ^[2] in 1898 and 1899.^[5] She became enamoured with a cellist, Arnold Trowell (Mansfield was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father), ^[2]in 1902, although the feelings were largely unreciprocated.^[6] Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling alienated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general terms, of how she became disillusioned due to the repression of the Mā ori people, who were often portrayed in a sympathetic or positive light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped. ^[1]

She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen's College along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed when at Queen's that she would take up professionally, ^[6] but she also began contributing to the school newspaper with such dedication that she eventually became editor during this period.^[1][5] She was particularly interested in the works of the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, ^[1] and she was appreciated amongst her peers for her vivacious and charismatic approach to life and work.^[5] She met fellow writer Ida Baker (also known as Lesley Moore), ^[1] a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends.^[2] Mansfield did not become involved in much political activity when she lived in London; for example, she did not actively support the suffragette movement in the UK (women in New Zealand had gained the right to vote in 1893).^[1]

Mansfield began journeying into continental Europe in 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, Mansfield returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer.^[5] It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym 'K. Mansfield'.^[6] During this time she rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle and of her family, and two years later headed again for London.^[1] Her father sent her an annual allowance of £ 100 for the rest of her life.^[2] In later years she expressed both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals, and she was never able to return there, partly due to her tuberculosis.^[1]

Mansfield had two lesbian relationships during this period, notable for their pre-eminence in her journal entries. Mansfield biographer Angela Smith has said that this is evidence of her " transgressive impetus", although Mansfield continued to have male lovers, and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times.^[1] Her first relationship was with Maata Mahupuku, a young Mā ori woman whom Mansfield had first met in Wellington, and then again in London. In June 1907 she wrote: " I want Maata—I want her as I have had her—terribly. This is unclean I know but true." The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908, and Mansfield also professed her adoration for her in her journals.^[7]

Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into the bohemian way of life lived by many artists and writers of that era, although she published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months there.^[5] Mansfield sought out the Trowell family for companionship, and whilst Arnold was involved with another woman, Mansfield embarked on a passionate affair with his brother, Garnet.^[6] By early 1909 she had become pregnant with his child, though Trowell's parents disapproved of the relationship, and the two broke up. She hastily entered into a marriage with a singing teacher 11 years older, ^[8] George Bowden, on 2 March, but left him the same evening, having failed to consummate the marriage.^[6] After a brief reunion with Garnet, Mansfield's mother, Annie Beauchamp, arrived in 1909. She blamed the breakdown of the marriage on a lesbian relationship between Mansfield and Baker, and she quickly had her daughter despatched to thespa town of Bad Wö rishofen in Bavaria, Germany. Mansfield miscarried after attempting to lift a suitcase on top of a cupboard. It is not known whether her mother knew of this miscarriage when she left shortly after arriving in Germany, but she cut Mansfield out of her will.^[6]

Mansfield's time in Bavaria was to have a significant effect on her literary outlook. She was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov, a writer who proved to have greater influence upon her writing in the short term than Wilde, on whom she had been fixated. She returned to London in January 1910, and had over a dozen works published in A.R. Orage's The New Age, a socialist magazine and highly-regarded intellectual publication. She became a friend and lover of Beatrice Hastings, who lived with Orage.^[9] Her experiences of Germany formed the foundation of her first published collection, In a German Pension, ^[6] in 1911, a work that was lauded by a number of critics (and enjoyed for its unfavourable portrayal of Germans) but which she later described as " immature".^[5] The most successful story from this work was Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding. ^[6]