Urewera Notebook by Katherine Mansfield

Book excerpt: An authoritative scholarly edition of Mansfield's camping journal, offering new understandings of her colonial lifeKatherine Mansfield filled the first half of the Urewera Notebook during a 1907 camping tour of the central North Island, shortly before she left New Zealand forever. Her camping notes offer a rare insight into her attitude to her country of birth, not in retrospective fiction but as a nineteen year old still living in the colony. This publication is theirst scholarly edition of the Urewera Notebook, providing an original transcription, a collation of the alternative readings and textual criticism of prior editors, and new information about the politics, people and places Mansfield encountered on her journey. As a whole, this edition challenges the debate that has focused on Mansfield's happiness or dissatisfaction throughout her last year in New Zealand to reveal a young writer closely observing aspects of a country hitherto beyond her experience and forming a complex critique of her colonial homeland.Key Features:A new, more accurate transcription of the notebookTextual notes provide significant variant readings from other extant editions of the notebook An introductory essay draws on important new developments in New Zealand literary criticism, advances in historiography of the period and legal historyIncludes a route map, revised itinerary and authoritative annotation for the textIncludes 20 photographs, many previously unpublished, from Beauchamp family photograph albums at the Alexander Turnbull Library and Ebbett Papers at the Hawke's Bay Museum