Katherine Mansfield Society Birthday Lecture, 2026
Wednesday 14 October, 6pm (UK time)
The next Katherine Mansfield Society Birthday Lecture will be delivered by John Wood (details below). The event will take place online. To receive the Zoom link, please register as an attendee. We look forward to seeing you!
John Wood, ‘Mansfield and Orage: “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” and the strange case of “Sally Beauchamp”’
The fact that the Mansfield record has been distorted or destroyed at various points means that there are gaps to be filled. Any evidence which may relate to those gaps that can be found is worthy of scrutiny. As the title to this lecture suggests, there are two aspects to this talk which might each stand on their own but do overlap; not least because consideration of ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ provided the clues which led to ‘Sally Beauchamp’.
In this birthday lecture, John Wood will look to cast further light on one of the more difficult episodes in Mansfield’s life; and what in some ways is her most problematic story. The lecture will go back to the beginning of Mansfield’s literary relationship with A.R.Orage. ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ was the first of Mansfield’s stories which Orage published in the socialist New Age. The psychological background to the story is, like many aspects of Mansfield’s life, complex. It was likely to have been relevant to Orage’s acceptance of the story for publication; and his subsequent role as a mentor of Mansfield. It also exposes the source of Mansfield’s search until the very end of her life for what she called her desire ‘to be real’.
John Wood is a retired lawyer with an interest in the New Age, its editor A. R. Orage and his association with Katherine Mansfield. Following his legal career as a partner in an international law firm, he undertook a research Master’s at Birkbeck, University of London, focussing on the New Age and Orage’s socialist modernism. He has previously contributed two essays to the Katherine Mansfield Society yearbook, Katherine Mansfield Studies, relating to aspects of Mansfield’s relationship with Orage and the New Age.