Melodies for Mansfield

Five years ago, Northampton-based academic and Katherine Mansfield scholar Gerri Kimber discovered 26 poems by Mansfield in the Newberry Library in Chicago, of which only nine had been published previously.

Written when Mansfield was in her early twenties, around the time of an affair, a pregnancy, an unconsummated marriage and a miscarriage, the poems made up The Earth Child cycle.

In the subsequently published , editors Kimber and Sorbonne professor Claire Davison noted the author – this country’s most internationally acclaimed short-story writer – had been overlooked as a poet, but, in 1916, had