 Good evening. I'm Molly Rosenberg, Director of the Royal Society of Literature and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the last of this year's Dalloway Day discussions celebrating Virginia Woolf's life and work. Tonight we'll be marking a hundred years of Woolf's only short story collection Monday or Tuesday with an exploration of the short fiction that she wrote and the relationship between two of modernism's finest writers, Catherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. We're delighted this evening to be in the good company of our partners the British Library who hold extensive collections on Woolf and Mansfield. Links to these including manuscripts and articles are all available on the event page on the British Library website so that you can keep Dalloway Day going for weeks to come. What more could you want? Before you dive into those I'll introduce our chair for this evening's conversation. RSL fellow novelist and short story writer Irenason Okoji. Irenason's debut novel Butterfly Fish won a Betty Trask Award and her short stories have been published internationally with her collection Speak Gargantula shortlisted for the Edge Hill short story prize, the Jalak Prize and the Saboteur Awards and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. Last week she was made MBE for her services to literature. Thank you so much Irenason. Over to you. Thank you so much Wally. I'm thrilled to be here moderating this panel. It's a wonderful event in partnership with the RSL and the British Library celebrating the fascinating complicated friendship between two great writers Virginia Woolf and Catherine Mansfield. Joining me to discuss this are three brilliant authors Emily Midorokawa, Emma Claire Sweeney and Kirsty Gunn. If you have questions for the writers please do post them. I'll get to them later. In the meantime I'd like to introduce our guests without further ado. Kirsty Gunn won the Edge Hill Prize for short stories for her collection Infidelities and is a patron of the International Catherine Mansfield Society. Emily Midorokawa is the author of Out of the Shadows, six visionary Victorian women in search of a public voice. She co-authored with Emma Claire Sweeney a secret sisterhood, the hidden friendships of Austin, Bronte, Elliott and Woolf. Emily won the Lucie Cavendish Fiction Prize and has written for the Telegraph, the Paris Review and the Washington Post. Emma Claire Sweeney is the author of a award-winning novel Al Songet Dawn and co-author with Emily Midorokawa of A Secret Sisterhood, the hidden friendships of Austin, Bronte, Elliott and Woolf. A recipient of Arts Council Royal Literary Fund and Society of Authors Awards. Emma is a lecturer at the Open University where her research focuses on Virginia Woolf. Guys, thank you so much for joining us. I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you. Reading the stories of both Woolf and Mansfield, what struck me is that in modernist fashion they are character driven rather than plot driven. They're kind of quiet measured stories about small moments that build to an epiphany, often set within the domestic, often looking at women and their internal desires, as well as the external issues they have to navigate. They're fascinating, beautifully crafted stories. I wondered, when did you first discover that they were actually friends and what struck you about the differences and similarities in terms of their work? I'm going to ask each of you but come to Emily first. Thank you. So Emma and Guy became interested in the subject of female literary friendship, actually quite a number of years ago now. We started by writing feature articles on the subject and we were running a literary blog that was looking at female literary friends. I think both Emma and I initially actually made the mistake of thinking that Woolf and Mansfield were not friends at all. We knew there was a connection between them but we saw them perhaps more as enemies actually rather than friends. I think probably the reason for that is some of the things that they said about each other, well recorded things they said about each other during their lifetimes, do not sound like the comments of a good friend to another. Just to give you an example, Woolf once likened her friend Catherine Mansfield to a civic cat that has taken to street walking. It's just one example of quite a number of choice quotes like that. I think because these quotes have often taken a little bit out of context, they're often quoted in essays perhaps or articles that don't really give like a full picture of what these women had said to each other. I think because they're so quotable, they're so funny, they're so interesting. These kinds of comments have overshadowed, traditionally overshadowed focus on the complex but certainly close literary friendship between these two. Yeah, they're such barbed comments, aren't they? They just intrigue you. You wonder how do they recover from that in terms of their friendship and recon style and still be able to support each other's work and voices. Emma, I want to come to you next. Yeah, I think that they actually were very good, certainly Woolf was very good at accommodating rivalry within the friendship. So it was an extremely fraught relationship. There's no denying that. But I think the rivalry was something that was useful to them. So Woolf could see that Mansfield could do things that she couldn't do. And she acknowledged that she was jealous of that. But I think that spurred her on to try to up her game in her own writing. So for instance, in Prelude, which obviously Woolf published through Hogarth Press with Leonard, she massively admired that story. And I think something that Mansfield does so cleverly and prelude is obviously bringing together those small quiet moments of life and the rich sensory detail that take us to the Wellington home. But also she has the power of silence in that story. What is this a prelude to? What's going to happen next that will disrupt this childhood idyll? And we have all these sort of sinister notes in that story that give us a sense of the unspoken, which of course is the Great War, which we know as readers was about to happen. And I think that pushed Woolf to challenge herself to write about the political, to write about terrain that might have been considered traditionally masculine. And in her future work, she went on to write about the war in this kind of slant way that perhaps she learned from Mansfield. Yeah, Kersti, how about you? And not only to write about that war, but to write differently, because I think what's so beautiful about this relationship between these two, as Molly said at the beginning, key writers of the 20th century is that they were after something so different. Both of them were throwing off an enormously weighty tradition, both of them were surrounded by male hegemonies of what constituted proper literature, how society was constituted, how the war itself was viewed, all of these things, they were two women, they were outsiders, they came into the center of literary activity, and they forged a new kind of story. I think Emily and Emma are absolutely right to remind us that much has been made in biography and the press and so on, about this being some kind of rankerous, vicious rivalry. No doubt, as we all know, all of us who are writers are always interested in the works of other writers. But as Vincent O'Sullivan, the terrific you know, international Wolf scholar, and of course, who edited the collected letters tells us this was something like friendship. You know, at the end of the day, this was two women who were working hard and professionally on their car. They knew that they could learn a great deal from each other and work. And I think that all of our, the wealth of critical material that we have around this relationship, I think of Angela Smith's beautiful public of two, I think of the amazing collected stories of Mansfield that Jerry Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan have put together, I think of the work of Claire Hansen and David Bradshaw, all of this work gives us a picture of two women who are at the top of their game and absolutely using and being inspired by each other, nourishing each other to give us a new kind of fiction. Yeah, they certainly, they certainly seem like fierce women, but also rivals in the best sense of the word, that you know, because you, you inspire each other, you support each other, you read each other's work and feedback. So I love that element about their friendship. When they actually first met, Mansfield was the more prolific, you know, writing short stories, writing poetry, really becoming a great force in her own rights. What drew you to her, her work, Kirsty, and how has it influenced your fiction? Well, you're quite right. I mean, Mansfield had been writing short stories for a very long time and publishing way before 1921, when we have Wolf's Monday or Tuesday, that we're celebrating here tonight. Her first collection in a German poncion sold out like it was a massive, it was a big deal at the time. And in fact, throughout her life, her publishers were pestering her to repad that reprinting. She herself set it to one side, you know, she'd moved on to, to much more interesting things. And she dismissed those early stories as being a kind of form of caricature. But yeah, I mean, I came to both of these writers very early, I was lucky enough to be a drip fed Catherine Mansfield as a child and growing up in New Zealand. And from that very quickly, I developed a reading relationship with Wolf as well. So to read those two writers alongside each other and kind of take it for granted in one's teenage years, feels like a mighty gift. Absolutely. Just thinking about Mrs. Dalloway, which was actually a short story in its first iteration, that absolutely makes sense to me as a short story writer, that it would then develop into a novel because you have so much more to say, you want to give that character much more dimension and much more space. I wondered if each of you could talk about your ideas around the relationship or connections between short stories and novels. I'll come to Emily first. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. I think with that particular Wolf's short story, Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, it can be read as a short story that can be enjoyed on its own terms. Obviously, to read it now, you know that it became a very, very well known novel. So it's actually a little bit hard to sort of, you know, put yourself into the into the mindset of someone who perhaps encountered the story for the first time when it came out. But I I still think there's something about that story, although it does work on its own terms that does cry out for greater expansion. You know, as I say, I am coming from this from the period of knowing it is a novel as well or the beginning of a novel, although obviously there are differences between the start of Mrs. Dalloway and that short story. I think it's quite interesting to compare a story like that to some of the Wolf's other stories that have a more, perhaps like a more complete feel to them. And also some of Catherine Mansfield's stories as well. I mean, if we think of something like The Garden Party, you know, obviously Mansfield could have written, you know, a full novel about these characters. And certainly when that story ends, you do have this feeling in your mind that you haven't, you know, not everything has been revealed to you. And the story, the characters keep working in your mind. Do you wonder what's going to happen next? I do think Mansfield, to me, really does feel like a natural short story writer in the sense that although there's always so much more to say and so much more to come back to with her stories because they do change on reading after reading, they do actually tend to feel really perfect in that form. I rarely read a story by Mansfield. I think, oh, this would work better as along the piece of work. I don't know what other people think about that. But that's certainly my feeling with her best works. Yeah, her stories also have, I think, a lovely quiet tension. So much of it is also about what's not said, you know, the secret or silent desires of women and the idea of fulfillment and what that looks like and how you process it or how you even articulate it. I love that she's able to explore that in some of her brilliant stories. So I agree. I think she's an excellent short story writer. Yeah, I think actually this policy of so much being unsaid is one of the things that draws you back to these stories again and again. You don't really read them like what's going to happen next. You know, the story is not spoiled by knowing the ending of it. You come back to it differently every time. I think we like all good short stories but also works of literature. If you read these stories at different stages in your life, your take on them as well is quite different. Yeah, absolutely. Emma, I'll come to you next. Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that perhaps Mansfield's real focus on the short story and Wolf's sort of great achievements in the novel was perhaps a way that they could accommodate their differences and their mutual talents. So when Mansfield reviewed Night and Day, Virginia Wolf's second novel, she actually gave it a really quite scathing review in some ways. At one point she said that reading the novel made one feel old and chill. And in order to sort of process that criticism when it was still quite raw, Wolf kind of wrote it off by saying, Oh, the review shows that Mansfield isn't interested in novels. So she tried to make that differentiation. And then when they managed to kind of come to some sort of uneasy understanding about that review, through Mansfield, eventually explaining to Wolf what her problem with the novel was. And the problem was that it didn't acknowledge the First World War, not just in content, but as Kersti was mentioning earlier, really, I think mostly her problem was about the form. The form of the novel hadn't sufficiently changed to accommodate these great changes that have been brought in the world. And then once Wolf understood that, that seemed to be a message that then filtered into so much of her work subsequently, her stories and her novels. So very clearly in novels like Mrs. Dalloway, where we have someone suffering from shell shock, but also into the lighthouse when a family is ripped apart by the wolf. But I think it affected her stories too. So when they did come to this sort of understanding about the reason why Mansfield had a problem with the novel, Mansfield actually commissioned Wolf to write a short story for the Athenaeum, which Mansfield's husband was editing. And Wolf replied by saying, oh, I don't think I can write stories. And Mansfield said, nobody can write stories other than you. Now, she was, you know, that was flattery. Mansfield knew full well that she could write stories supremely well herself. But I think this difference in form allowed them to learn from each other in a way that perhaps didn't feel directly competitive. And I think Mansfield felt very envious of Wolf, actually, the time and ease that she perceived Wolf having, that she perceived as allowing her to write these longer forms. So she talked about, you know, of course, Wolf can can write these novels because she's in her own house surrounded by her own possessions with her husband within call. And certainly Wolf did have this sort of ordered life around her partly facilitated by her husband that I think Mansfield both despised and craved. Yeah, I mean, I could only imagine how much more competitive the relationship would have been had they been operating in the same form. And actually after that scathing critique, there was a period of time that passed before they reconciled. And when they were able to reconcile, you know, the feedback that she received from Mansfield actually helped her to become a better writer. So when she was able to take it on board and process it, it's interesting that she went on to write amazing novels. So, you know, that relationship proved to be very useful for Wolf. Gasti, I want to come to you next. Yes, well, I just want to go back to Emma's very important point that, you know, there are there are absolutely links between the two forms. And we see that in the working relationship of these two women. You know, it's a question of timeline, too, because obviously Mansfield's life is short. Now, we know in that short life, she had plans absolutely to write a novel. She could imagine the novel. She had a feeling of the sense of it. She knew the kind of thing it was going to be. As Emily said, she'd already been thinking about how some of those stories prelude at the Bay and so on, this cast of characters might find a larger space to move around. And it was a question of time. She died in early 1923. It started right in all of the amazing novels that we love. And her short story at the Bay is there into the lighthouse. And we can also see all kinds of parts of prelude sounding through the work of war. There was no question that these women were richly creative influences upon each other. And had Mansfield lived, I think there is no doubt in scholars minds going through the letters, going through the journals that Mansfield would have written novels as well. And I think the other thing that's really interesting to think about here, too, is the relationship between novel and short story for these two writers in particular, because we have writers engaged in the practice of a new kind of a future, a new kind of approach to telling stories that's not about but is that gives us a feeling and impression, a sense of being there. As you yourself said at the beginning of this film, this feeling of character, of the people being right up close and with us that we live, we live their lives with them. So all of these things can be in a short story and they can be in a novel. It's a question of making that novel in a different kind of way, piece by piece, fragment by fragment and shunt and getting rid of, shunting off this enormous canonical sense of what novel has been. Beautifully said, Kersti. And that's exactly that. I think the best way to approach writing a novel is looking at it as pieces of a puzzle. You know, I often think of it as interconnected shorts because I write short stories myself and that actually helped me write the novel. Otherwise, I just felt so intimidated by the actual process of doing it. So it's about finding a way to get round it, I think, as a writer in a way that you can process it, that keeps it exciting, that keeps it dynamic and every every writer has a unique approach to that, I guess, and how, you know, how do you make something? You know, some of that process is actually really mysterious when people ask me, well, how did you write the novel? It's it's very difficult to just completely fully articulate it. So it's an elusive intriguing process, I think, but you articulated it really beautifully. Emma Mansfield died in in 1928, as Kersti mentioned, but their friendship was so deep and profound even though it was, you know, over a fairly short period of time. Why do you think their influence on each other has been somewhat overlooked? So good question. I think it's probably to do with the early days of Mansfield's posthumous memory. So her husband, John Middleton Murray, edited her letters and journal, and he was very keen to come across the most important literary influence on his wife and the person to whom she turned in the most significant way. He could let in some of the great Russian male writers, too, as being influencers. So obviously acknowledged the influence of Chekhov. But I think on the one hand he perhaps felt that a knowledgeable influence would be to diminish his own. And secondly, I think, you know, clearly he had quite a complex relationship with Wolf himself. You know, by by the end of Wolf's life, she really had very little time for John Middleton Murray. And I suspect the feelings were mutual. So there might have been some kind of personal reason for him wanting to kind of write her out. And then once Wolf died, you know, her early biographies, Quentin Bale, for instance, her nephew, he pretty much dismissed the influence and basically saying that, you know, Wolf thought of Mansfield as a bit of a tart. Which on the one hand, you know, plenty of the comments she made about her could sort of give him that impression, you know, he said. He probably thought of Wolf saying that she'd gone all sorts of hog by the time she was 17. But I think that failed to really acknowledge the complexity of that fascination that Wolf was actually fascinated by Mansfield's sexual history. I think fascinated and at some points truly disgusted, but in a way that was perhaps creatively rich by some of the portrayal of sexuality in Mansfield's work and female desire. And I think it probably tapped into some at that point, sort of quite on articulated aspects of Wolf's life, which she later went on to express somewhat in her relationships, but also more importantly, I think in her writing. And I do think that, you know, obviously we've had amazing biographers like Claire Tomlin and Hermione Lee, who from the 1980s onwards have been bringing this relationship to light and being acknowledging the huge influence. And you really have to really be quite studious in your attempts to ignore the influence because it's so clear. I think if you look at a story like The Garden Party where, you know, the death of a lower class man kind of disrupts this more this higher class party and then you see a novel like Mrs. Dalloway where exactly the same scenario occurs. And this happens time and again with themes that Mansfield explores in her stories than emerging later in Wolf's novels. Brilliant. Yeah. And I think also Mansfield was several years younger than Wolf and perhaps that played an element in terms of her interest in her, you know, as the slightly more youthful character brimming with interesting ideas, exploring sexuality and exciting themes. So there seem to be a kind of mutual entry between the two of them. Emily, they're often portrayed as enemies and that's really interesting. This is something that we see over and over again, women who, you know, have a similar passion being pitted against each other. Why is that? Is it just that it makes it culturally more exciting for the audiences or the readers, you know, to be more drawn to their work? There's some idea or reason behind it. But why do you think that is? Yeah. So I mean, we should remember, of course, that this was a friendship that did have friction in it. We know that from some of the things that they said to each other, you know, some of the periods when they were not getting on so well and periods when they were apart and would, you know, feel quite insecure, perhaps about how the other one felt. But I think as we've all been talking about already, it was a genuine friendship that could accommodate rivalry and in fact, could use rivalry as, you know, a fuel to creatively, but it was also like kind of maybe a personal driving force behind the relationship as well. I think what you said, though, is really interesting. I think we do still as a society, certainly in their day, but I think still today really struggle to accommodate ideas of ambitious women being able to be friends. I think the stereotype of an ambitious woman is often, you know, someone who's trampling over all of her sisters to kind of get to her place at the top. And so I think the fact that these two clearly were intellectual women, they were ambitious, they're very committed to their art, almost, you know, has made it so. Their status in that sense. It's too easy, I think, to write them off as enemies straight away just because of some of the stereotypes we have around ambitious women. And it's quite interesting. Emma and I talked about this quite a lot when we were writing in our book, A Secret Sisterhood, because when you think of the great male writing friendships, you know, Byron and Shelley, for instance, or Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Rivalry or, you know, interesting bus stops is often, you know, that's often part of the mythology of those friendships. One of the things that people find interesting about them. But I think in cases of female friendship, it's often much harder for people to wrap their head around that. So these insults that they traded can not be seen as part of an interesting creative relationship. They're immediately written off as just bitchy comments, you know, and the relationship is downplayed because of that. Yeah, that's how they're fabulously barbed comments, though, as well. I think they're very, very funny. I'm not sure I would quite recover if my one or two of my female author friends would say those things, but they were obviously made of tough stuff. So, Kersti, you were going to add. Although I was just going to add my voice to Emily's. And I'm so glad, you know, that we've raised this issue of of feminism and the fact that we inhabit, we still inhabit a culture whereby yes, it's great fun and it gets a lot of traction to talk about women being ambitious, women seeing each other down, women wanting to beat each other at the post. And with that comes, of course, the absence of a literary female tradition, because instead of building up the great canonical map of work that is built piece by piece by one man standing on the shoulder of the one before, we instead get the so-called fragmentary moments, these moments of experimentation that then just simply dissolve on the landscape. So Wolf and Mansfield are an example of that so nearly happening. As you said around in your introduction to that question, it could have so easily been the case that due to gossip, due to certain kinds of malice, due to, yes, Middleton Murray's desire to forge this kind of unreal picture of his wife and her talent, all of these things could have meant that we didn't have, that we wouldn't be having the discussion we're having today about two women creating a new kind of picture. So we have to remind ourselves that this is something that we're still, shamefully, still getting our heads around this idea that women will help other women, that women's writing will enclose more women's writing, that that's a circle that will enlarge and admit more and more members instead of this idea of individual acts of daring, genius, beauty, whatever. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've certainly been very encouraged by my female friendships. They are actually crucial, I think, in terms of my writing life. So I draw great inspiration from Wolfram Mansfield and I think it's really important that we actually continue to have conversations about them, about their work and their friendships so that it doesn't get lost, you know, in the way that these things do. Emma, I want to come to you and just talk briefly about prelude, which is, again, a wonderful piece about familial connections. In it Mansfield uses a family's move to talk about class and again, female desires. And it's sort of it's it's a very measured piece, but there's this kind of strange incorporation of bird symbolism within it as well, which makes it slightly, slightly striking and strange. Could you talk a little bit about Wolf's role in bringing that to the public's attention? Sure. Yeah. So Wolf and her husband, Leonard, actually commissioned Catherine Mansfield to write a short story for the Hogarth Press. And the Hogarth Press was their own press. They'd set it up partly to free Virginia Wolf from the pressures of being published by her half brother, her step-brother, rather, who had actually sexually abused her as a child. So it must have been an incredibly fraught dynamic being reliant on him to bring her work out into the world. So when they set up their own press, initially they published a short story by each of them. But when they wanted to branch out and publish a story by a new writer, they chose Catherine Mansfield and they didn't approach anybody else. So they were really taking a punt on her. I think it shows a great deal about Wolf's admiration for Mansfield. And, you know, Prelude is a long short story. You know, it's it's sort of on the cusp of being a novella, really. And given that Mansfield was being published by Wolf, who was handsetting the print, literally every letter of Prelude Wolf handled with her own hands, placing them on the printer upside down the wrong way round. You know, it's an incredibly laborious process. And Wolf turned down lots of invitations the summer that she was typesetting Prelude. Their mutual friend, Ottoline Morel, was trying to get her to go down to Gaston Manor to parties and she was turning down those invitations to work on Prelude. They also had a print run, which was double the print run that they'd had for their own stories. So they had a lot of faith in this story. Unfortunately, they made a few mistakes with the printing of it. They had the title wrong on a few pages, for instance. And they didn't manage to get as much enthusiasm for the story as they'd hoped. So it wasn't particularly widely reviewed when it first came out. And it didn't get the reception it deserved. I think people, perhaps, people need time to learn how to read something that feels as new as that, sometimes as long as generations, really. So when it first came out, I think people thought, what is this? And people didn't understand what it was a Prelude to. And I think the title, Prelude, is actually one of the most brilliant things about that story, because the title is really in conversation with the whole story. I think we're being encouraged to ask, what is this a Prelude to? And as I suggested earlier, I think part of what it's a Prelude to is the terrible violence and conflict that was about to be brought on the world. Also on a more personal level, I think it's a Prelude to adulthood and to emerging sexuality. And there's all sorts of sinister, violent undertones in a story that, in many ways, is idyllic. So when we have the slaughter of the bird at the end, I mean, there's there's something so horrifying about that. And I think that's about a sense of loss of innocence. And I think all of these things Wolf did appreciate. So unlike many of their contemporaries, he said things like, well, it hardly sets the Thames on fire. Wolf defended it. Wolf said, no, this this is a work of art. She understood that it was a work of art. And so she put her body into this work and she engaged with it intellectually with her mind. And I think it was a huge influence on her future work. But as Kirsty has been emphasising, you know, they were both doing something incredibly new. And it's hardly surprising that early readers didn't always understand what they were. Yeah, I mean, I think I think Mansfield was daring, like you said, in that she was straddling two forms almost with this short story almost being like a novella. I think I wonder whether that was intentional. But, you know, it certainly makes it interesting as a form. I also love and feel deeply touched by the fact that, you know, Wolf was typesetting and that's a labour of love to do that, you know, page after page after page. It's really beautiful, actually. It makes me feel quite emotional and thinking about their friendship and that, you know, even though it wasn't received very well, she staunchly defended it. She saw the subtle power of Mansfield's writing, which is amazing. Emily, I want to come to you and just talk a little bit about Q Gardens, which presents an eclectic bunch of characters at Q and touches on themes of desire, loss, human connection. It has Wolf's kind of stream of consciousness that we now know her for. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about Mansfield's influence on Q Gardens. Yes, so Mansfield told Wolf that she thought Q Gardens marked a turning point in Wolf's career, which can probably be taken in more than one way, just to give you a bit of the background of the story. There was an occasion when Mansfield visited the home of Lady Otterly Morrill, who Emma was just talking about a moment ago. She had this beautiful house gassing to Manor with these fantastic gardens. And we know that Mansfield was very taken with the gardens. She wandered around. You know, she enjoyed collecting flowers that could be dried to make potpourri with. You know, she was very taken by the scenery. She was also inspired by it, but in a literary sense as well. We know from a letter that she wrote to her hostess afterwards that she talked about being inspired by the gardens, you know, wondering who might one day write about those gardens. And she talked a little bit about, you know, a literary work that was coming to fruition in her mind, where you would have couples wondering in and out of gardens and you'd have conversations coming in and out, sort of like a conversation set to the music of flowers as it were. So the flowers would be very much part of it. The gardens were very much part of it. And then, you know, the conversations between these different people coming in and out would be, yeah, sort of flowing together with the gardens themselves. We know that Mansfield also wrote to Wolf about her experience of visiting the gardens because it was something that Wolf relayed back to Utterly Morrill afterwards. We don't know this for certain because the letter no longer survives, but it seems likely, perhaps, that she mentioned some of these literary ideas to Wolf as well. Interestingly, sometime later, Wolf wrote a story, not set at Garcington Manor, it was set at Kew Gardens as you've just indicated. But there's marked similarities, I think, between what Mansfield had originally envisaged and this idea that Wolf actually brought to fruition. So Emma and I talked quite a lot about when we were writing A Secret of Secret, we talked quite a lot about, you know, the possibility that perhaps Mansfield had heard this, sorry, Wolf had heard this idea from Mansfield and then sort of taken it for herself in a way. And to go back to my point about Mansfield saying this marked turning point for Wolf in her literary career, that can obviously be seen as a great compliment, but it could also perhaps be some sort of an acknowledgement of the fact that in a way she may have felt that Wolf took her idea and made it a literary form in a way that she didn't. I mean, at this time, Mansfield was already suffering from ill health. She didn't have as much time to work on new ideas as she would have liked. She certainly had the idea that Wolf had, you know, almost all the time in the world and was very supportive, which in some ways she was, you know, her domestic setup was very different from that of Mansfield. So that's not to say that there weren't obstacles in Wolf's way as well. But, yeah, I don't know if you want to add something to this, Emma. I mean... I mean, any of us who write know that influences are complex and tricky thing. And I suppose reading between the lines of these letters with all the omissions that exist, unusually actually, it was very unusual for there to be gaps in Wolf's letter. So it's even perhaps significant that this letter is missing. We know that Wolf had been thinking about Kew Gardens before this conversation with Mansfield. She actually met Mansfield when she was recovering from an extremely difficult period in her mental health. She'd had to have several mental nurses. She'd gone through what was then referred as a nervous breakdown. And, you know, she'd been extremely ill for a long time. And it was actually during that period of illness that she first had an idea of writing about a garden. Clearly Mansfield and Wolf both shared great interesting gardens, you know, flowers and plants and the natural world come into both their work significantly. So we're not claiming that this was the only influence on Wolf's Kew Gardens. But it seems, in terms of looking at the timeline, that perhaps these conversations with Mansfield perhaps spurred her on and perhaps gave her a sense of how she might change the form in which she wrote. So, you know, in Kew Gardens, I think some of the most striking things of the, you know, the passages are written from the perspective of the snail, for instance. And I think feeling that anything is worthy of narrative. That any perspective can speak to us. I know in A Room of One's Own, Wolf talks about the pressure of doneness and the accumulation of unrecorded life. And in Kew Gardens, she takes that to quite an extreme innocent. And in a wider sense, I feel that's perhaps something that she was somewhat influenced by Mansfield too. In the Mansfield, you know, the wonderful way Mansfield evokes childhood and a child's perspective. That anyone can be a storyteller in the widest sense of the word. Anyone's life, anything's life, any object's life can be worthy of rich narrative scene. Amazing. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't begrudge Mansfield had she been a little bit resentful that Wolf basically took on her idea and went on to write this amazing piece. I mean, it does sound to me like she was the seminal influence in that. And perhaps she was very generous. What's the difference about Roanback actually? Because Mansfield did write a poem rather called Night-Centered Stock in which some of the ideas that she talked about in relation to Garthington Manor's Garden, they do come out in the poem. And one thing that really struck me on rereading the poem recently is there's a line in the poem where she asks whether the moon is a virgin or a harlot. And we'd referred earlier to some of the gossip that could have gotten in the way of the friendship between Mansfield and Wolf. And one of the really potential sticking points in that friendship was when Wolf was purported to have referred to herself as the chaste and Mansfield as the unchaste during some kind of malicious gossip session. And I thought, oh, the virgin and the harlot, the chaste and the unchaste, there don't seem to be some kind of resonance going on there. Yeah, that's definitely a point being made there, I think. Kersti, I want to come to you. Mansfield famously said, we have got the same job, Virginia, and it really is very curious and thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. I find this both practical, beautiful, but subtly provocative. It kind of acknowledges their similarities, but it also shows, I think, the difficulties of navigating that relationship and that same desire that they have. What do you make of reading between the lines of that, Kersti? Well, I think it goes back to this issue of influence, as you just said. Influence is a beautiful thing, you know? And for writers and artists, that sharing of ideas, that living in the imagination and talking about what you've seen there, this is part of what we do and who we are. I think that there is no question going back to this issue of sharing and things that are picked up and used. This is going to go on in such a relationship. Editing with Delia de Souza Carrera, the selected letters at the moment, we're highlighting all of Mansfield's relationships with artists, writers, musicians. It comes across time and time again that this is a mutually enriching practice. And I think that the issue of gardens, Mansfield would have been writing about gardens since she was a girl. I think that she could write about gardens in her sleep. So I think that to highlight this one issue as being something that we can once again, point the finger at and say this may have been something between the two writers, I think means that we lose the overall general perspective, which is that as both women said when they met each other, we are after the same thing. There was this question of form. What form is it? Mansfield asked of Prelude, as far as I know it's my own invention. Will the same year is saying to someone else completely unrelated, I think I'm going to have to make up a form for this kind of writing I want to make. Both of them wanted to explore the life of home, of domesticity, the quotidian, the everyday. They were doing this together. They were explorers, even as they had separate issues, separate ideas and separate projects. I love the idea of them being co-explorers. Actually, that's a really nice way of phrasing it. I mean, I could talk to you guys for ages. It's been such a wonderful fascinating conversation. But I'm going to have a look and see if we've got any audience questions for you. Yeah, there's a couple here. Okay, what should we take from looking back at two ambitious women and friends in terms of how we change our habits in regards for each other as ambitious novelists in this age? Who wants to take that? Kerst, did you want to take that? Oh, I think I've just kind of talked about it. I think it's an issue of an ongoing dialogue, an ongoing conversation, and at all points, upping the stakes and making the conversations more inclusive to share ideas more freely and to absent ourselves from the kinds of discussions that are hell-bent on gossip and division and malice. Lovely. Okay, here's a question. Why do you think Mansfield's work is or is perceived as more realist and less experimental than Wolf's? I'm going to come to Emily on that. I think because there's a perception that Mansfield's work is more accessible. I think a lot of people who haven't even read Virginia Wolf already arrive at the first thing that they do try and explore with this idea that this is a very, very challenging writer whose work is very difficult to wrap your head around. I think Mansfield doesn't really come with quite that same baggage, perhaps. Perhaps we also have an idea that short stories, although this clearly isn't true, that short stories are perhaps a simpler form. They're shorter. Perhaps if you are struggling with something, you can more easily reread it than a novel. I think, though, to think of it that way, though, is to really miss a lot of the depth and the subtlety of Mansfield's writing. I mean, I first encountered Mansfield's work a little bit later than I think Kirstie was saying herself. I think I was like in my early 20s, and I was, at this time, I think I was starting to take writing more seriously as a crash in something that I wanted to do. I don't always have this idea, actually, that I would like to be a writer, but this is the point where I was actually really getting down to the work on it rather than just thinking about it. And I found reading Mansfield's stories at that time extremely inspiring, and it really pushed my sense of what a short story could do and also how much staying power a short story could have. Like, yes, a short story can be short and lent. It might be over and done with. You can sit down and read it in a whole, in one sitting, it could be over and done in this little sort of five or 10 minutes when they came from some stories. But good short stories, you'll keep coming back to them and you'll keep re-reading them in different ways, which I think is definitely something that the best of Mansfield's work, well, Mansfield's work as a whole certainly does. I wonder what the sound of the difference between short stories and novels, too, because obviously a short story can make demands of its reader in a sense that a reader can come to a short story and feel, this is an experiment. This is something very different from anything I've read before, but I can give it a chance because of the brevity. Whereas obviously something like The Waves, where we have an experiment that is extended and that challenges us over many hours, days, weeks, potentially, of reading, that's a different kind of contract with the reader, I think. And quite possibly how Mansfield lived, she would have written work that challenged the reader in that same way. But as it stands, I think there are two differences. One is to do with form and the particular challenges of reading a novel that is written so very differently from the previous reading a reader might have encountered. And secondly, to do with the lifespan. So Wolf outlived Mansfield by a very long time and it was after Mansfield's death that she wrote the novels that we remember her by and that we consider to be her most experimental. Yeah, I wonder if losing such an important friend really spurred her on. In its way, to be able to create that work, having absorbed as much as possible from that friendship but also perhaps to honour it as well because she knows that her friend would have wanted her to go on and write better work. So it's amazing that she was able to do that. So we have a question here for myself and Kersti. When you write a short story, how do you build it into a full collection with others? Do you start with an idea for the collection or with a single story? Kersti, do you want to answer that first? Oh, I was going to ask if you might like to. I can, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I have so many ideas buzzing around in my head. I think I just start with just getting the story down and something I'm interested in is the theme of transformation. I think both consciously and subconsciously. So somehow a lot of the stories I write have that connecting underlying theme. So, you know, if I write, I don't know, maybe eight or seven stories and then it feels like I'm working towards some sort of collection. I don't really get stressed out about whether or not the stories connect because I know that somehow, you know, you're picking up on themes in other stories, there's crossover and it kind of happens organically. But Emma was talking a little bit about the short form earlier. I mean, I really love it. I think it's undervalued. I think it's a really rigorous form and I think it also helps greatly in terms of working on novels. And I really enjoy writing by forms. Kersti, I'll come to you. Well, I wonder if it might be a question of time. As Emma was saying, there's this issue of a kind of concentration of feeling and experience that we get in the short story and the expectation is set from the beginning because the reader has a contract with the pages, if you like. We know how much time is going to be invested as opposed to the novel where we can read by its spine, how long we're going to be involved in that process. However, going back to what I was touching on before, to my mind as the writer and as a reader, I'm just very engaged by the relation between the two genres. And I do think that what Wolf and Mansfield show us is that short stories, that kind of concentration of impression, that highlighted feeling, that sense of entering into an experience, this is something that can be revisited and remade and it can become something like a novel and it can also become something like a collection of short stories that are related and it can also be a collection of short stories that are separate in this book. I think to imagine the form itself as giving us some kind of instruction as to how to create a really exciting kind of fiction that delivers us an experience rather than simply telling us a story. I think at that point, the two coalesce and cohere and we have something that's exciting and full of energy. Yeah, absolutely. It's such a dynamic, exciting form for me and there are so many writers doing really interesting things with it. Emily and Emma, I wanna come to you again, your great friends, a friendship I myself have been a little bit obsessed with, I have to admit. You both curated the amazing Something Rhymes which is this wonderful repository of female literary friendships. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how you draw inspiration from Wolfram Mansfield in terms of your friendship. I mean, I know you've written about them, notably for the Paris Review. I read that, it was a wonderful piece. But yeah, I wonder if you could just touch on that briefly. Emily, I'm gonna come to you. So Emma and I have never said the sort of things to each other, either or either to each other or behind each other's back that we know Wolfram Mansfield is so famous for. But I think we have actually learned quite a lot from their friendship. In some ways, I think when we first started exploring that friendship initially on the blog, Something Rhymed, and then in our book, A Secret Sisterhood, I felt this was a friendship that was very, very different from our own, partly because of those sorts of comments, but also because there seemed to be some quite marked contrasts between the two writers, particularly in terms of their personalities, certainly the friction that was very much part of the friendship is not really something that has particularly existed in my relationship with Emma, I'm glad to say. But as time went on, I thought actually there are some sort of similarities here. Right from the start off, writing has been pretty central to our friendship in a way that it was to these two. For many, many years, we've shared work with each other, we've run ideas by each other. There are other elements to our friendship, but the writing has always been quite a driving force, I'd say, so there's a similarity there. I think something that I learned from them though is that rivalry and friction, the friction I can be accommodated into a friendship. And never more was this important than when we were working on A Secret Sisterhood, I would say we've had more proper bus stops, probably isn't quite the right word, that we certainly had more moments of friction when we were hammering out the final stages of that book than we'd ever really had before. And be able to see that there were these two women who had come before us who had managed to negotiate, to a much greater extreme as well, arguments and disagreement into their friendship. I think it was very helpful. I think it's only natural that there would be some bus stops considering you were working on a book together, a very intense process, even for just an individual. So I think that's perfectly natural. How about for you, Emma? Yeah, one thing that Emily taught me, and I think that once we learned about Mansford and Wolf, we sort of appreciated the huge importance of it was the importance of honesty and our friendship. Now Mansfield and Wolf aspired to be scrupulously honest. And in some ways they did achieve that. Obviously Mansfield wrote a review that was very honest about Wolf's work and she felt she had a moral obligation to be honest to her friends and about to her friends. But also there were obviously the backbiting that went on behind backs and the periods, for instance, she hadn't actually told Wolf that she was going to review the work. So it came as rather a shock when Wolf read it. And that attempt to be scrupulously honest, although I would say Emily and I tried to do it in a slightly kinder way, has been hugely important. And if you're going to write with someone, which on this occasion when we wrote a Secret Sisterhood, we obviously did, that really comes to the fore. And so when we did have bust-ups, as Emily referred to them, it was important that we could, you know, that we had the kind of friendships that allowed us to have these quite rigorous debates that we could disagree and that that was never going to threaten the friendship. And in fact, really never, those bust-ups never really left the study, did they? There were never things that kind of festered. And one of the things that Wolf said about female literary friendship that's always stayed with me, was that in her sort of wiser or more reflective moment, she understood that it was really absurd to think, if she's good, then I'm not. And so actually to be able to acknowledge and celebrate a female friend's talent and to not think that in any way that why would that diminish yours? And to be able to acknowledge and celebrate that different. And she also said, whenever she was afflicted by jealousy, she, again, in her wiser moment, she realized that the only thing is to confess it. And I think that speaks to this sort of scrupulous honesty that if one feels jealous, one needs to investigate that. Why do I feel jealous? It's probably because my friend is doing something I admire, that they're achieving something in their work. If I'm jealous of the work, then I can learn from it. And so I suppose we started off with this sort of sense of honesty and then through what Wolf and Mansfield did well, but also through their pitfalls, I think we learned a little bit about what that might actually mean in practice. Yeah, it's about being honest, like you said, but also elevating each other and allowing space for mistakes. I cannot imagine yours and Emily's friendships not surviving the bus stop because you are great friends. We've now come to the end of the session. Thank you so much to our wonderful guests for such a robust, fascinating conversation. I don't know about you, but it's given me a whole new appreciation for my female literary friendships and it makes me just want to connect with them even more. So thank you for your fantastic contributions. I'm gonna hand over back to Molly. Thank you so much, Irenison, Emily, Claire and Kirsty. What a brilliant, challenging, bold and thoughtful way to end Dalloway Day 2021. A huge thank you to all our speakers and partners today, including Kate Moss, Gemma Seltzer, Shahid Abari, Kabe Wilson, Mulberry School, Sushila Nasta, Alexander Barb, Claire Wilcox and Ramesh Gunasekera. And of course the wonderful speakers you've heard from this evening. We were very sad to have to reschedule our event with Deborah Levy and Merv Emery due to the family bereavement of one of our speakers and our thoughts are with them today too. We'll be rescheduling the event with Lit Hub as soon as possible and everyone who's booked on for that will be contacted and their tickets will carry forward and there'll be another chance for you to book for that too when we're able to hold it. If you want more from all of today's speakers, which I imagine you certainly do, you can buy their books through the RSL on bookshop.org and support independent bookshops while you do it. So a thoroughly good thing all round. If you want to come to more of our events, events just like this for free, please join the Royal Society of Literature. We're running a special Dalloway Day offer, which you can just about still get to give you 20% off membership using the code Dalloway Day, Dalloway member and 10% of our digital events pass using the code Dalloway Pass. And I think you can find that on all of our social media channels if you want to look it up later. Our next event, the RSL's next event is on Saturday this week and you will get even more of the wonderful Irenison. Join us for an event co-curated with the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona as we release for the first time new commissioned writing and films from RSL president Marina Warner and RSL fellows Sophie Collins and the wonderful Irenison Akoti. Members, fellows and digital pass holders of the RSL can book through our website and for public tickets you can book through the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona through their website. You don't need to. A huge thank you finally for this evening to everyone at the British Library, particularly Bea Rowlett and John Fawcett to Beth Gallimore at the RSL, mastermind of this year's Dalloway Day and our producers unique media for making tonight possible. And to all of you for joining us and sending such wonderful questions, I hope that you've had as good a Dalloway Day as I have and until next time, good night. Thank you.