‘All glittering with broken light’: Katherine Mansfield and Impressionism

Mansfield has often been noted for a visually perceptive or ‘painterly’ style of writing. If the form and content of her oeuvre are informed by the fine arts, the rhetoric involved in her text can be best termed as ‘impressionist’. Not only is her writing vibrant with light, colour and perceptual sensations, but it also established the short story, her hallmark genre, as the most appropriate mode for the impressionist record of transience, speed and mutability – the defining qualities of urban modernity. This article, accordingly, considers affinities between Mansfield and the Impressionists in terms of aesthetics, technical innovation and thematic concerns. Both based their art upon the same epistemological grounds that human knowledge and perception, conditioned by individual sensory experience at a specific time and space, are essentially subjective. They thus found conventional modes of representation inadequate to accommodate shifting awareness, seeking to forge a new aesthetic through a series of formal experiments. Common ground is also found in their thematic concerns. Mansfield, like the Impressionists, developed a predilection for urban subject matter, tapping into the ambivalent aspects of modern city life. An exploration of Mansfield and Impressionism thus sheds new light on her art, suggesting the fascinating interplay between text and image within a modernist framework.