The peer-reviewed yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Published by Edinburgh University Press. Editors: Dr Gerri Kimber and Dr Aimee Gasston.
The yearbook is available for purchase through the KMS Shop
Vol 18 KMS CFP 2025 download here
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 18 OF
Katherine Mansfield Studies
THE PEER-REVIEWED YEARBOOK OF THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY
PUBLISHED BY EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
on the theme of
KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S MEN
Editors
Dr Erika Baldt and Dr Gerri Kimber
Deadline for submissions
31 August 2025
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‘Everything must ring like elizabethan english and like those gentlemen I always seem to be mentioning ‘the Poets’. There is a light upon them especially upon the elizabethans and our ‘special’ set – Keats, W.W. Coleridge Shelley De Quincey and Co. […] Those are the people with whom I want to live – those are the men I feel are our brothers’. (Letter to John Middleton Murry, 4–5 March 1918)
‘These dark young men – so proud of their plumes and their black and silver cloaks and ever so expensive pompes funebres – Ive no patience’. (Letter to Virginia Woolf, 12 May 1919)
The editors of Katherine Mansfield Studies invite contributions to volume 18, to be published in 2026, that explore any aspect of the theme of this volume: Katherine Mansfield’s Men. Mansfield’s career was in many ways shaped by men, from literary heroes such as Wilde and Chekhov whom she mimicked as she found her own voice, to editors such as A. R. Orage and John Middleton Murry, who provided her with early publishing opportunities. Her personal life, too, was coloured by intense identification with male counterparts like Murry and her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp, whose death in the Great War marked a turning point in Mansfield’s career, as she claimed: ‘every word I write & every place I visit I carry you with me’ (CW4, p. 204). At the same time, however, Mansfield was sceptical of many of her male contemporaries, being unable to see, for example, as Lawrence did, ‘sex in trees, sex in the running brooks, sex in stones & sex in everything’, as she confided to Beatrice Campbell (4 May 1916). In fact, according to Claire Harman, ‘Mansfield’s kind of modernism was always significantly different from her contemporaries Joyce, Eliot and Pound, and her development was more organic, and personal’ (Harman, All Sorts of Lives, London: Chatto & Windus, 2023, p. 216). The aim of this volume will be to explore how Mansfield forged her identity as a woman and as a writer, in relation to the men in her life.
Subjects might include (but are not limited to):
• Men in Mansfield’s fiction
• Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
• Mansfield and Gurdjieff
• Mansfield’s familial relationships with men, such as Harold Beauchamp and Leslie Beauchamp
• Mansfield’s relationships with other men such as D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, J. D. Fergusson, Francis Carco, George Bowden, etc.
• Mansfield’s working partnerships: Murry, A. R. Orage, S. S. Koteliansky
• Mansfield and her [male] literary heroes: Chekhov, Dickens, Wilde, etc.
• Mansfield and the [male] musical world
• Mansfield and the [male] medical establishment
• Mansfield and World War I
• Mansfield and the modernist canon
• Gender performance in Mansfield’s fiction
• Gendered critical reception of Mansfield’s work
Please email submissions of 5000-6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt, Times New Roman, double line-spaced, with a 100 word abstract + 5 keywords & 50-word biography, to the editorial team at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
PLEASE NOTE: ALL SUBMISSIONS WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE ENTERED FOR OUR ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION UNLESS AUTHORS INDICATE OTHERWISE.
*An MHRA Style Guide is available on the Katherine Mansfield Society website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/
Creative Writing
We welcome creative submissions – poetry, short stories, creative essays, on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield. Please send submissions, accompanied by a brief (50 words) biography, to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.
Click Here to access the Style Guide which should be referred to for all submissions.
Click Here to access the MHRA Style Guide which our own Style Guide refers to.
