![\"Katherine](\"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/KM-headshot.jpg\" "\\"Katherine")
<\/a>Katherine Mansfield<\/p><\/div>\n
Katherine Mansfield<\/a> was my heroine and role model. Born in New Zealand in 1888, she too had embarked for England as a young woman determined to make her name as a writer. Through privation and illness she continued to write and publish story collections that made her famous. I could do that too, I told myself.<\/p>\n Title page to the 1922 Knopf edition of possibly Mansfield’s most famous story collection.<\/p><\/div>\n But there was a variation to our respective histories I had not counted on. In New Zealand before we left, I had given birth to a stillborn daughter. Looking back, I understand that depression fueled by guilt and buried grief over this loss exacerbated the homesickness and culture shock I experienced that first year in England. My unsuccessful search for a writing job did not help. In traditional wifely fashion, I had held off until Tony found work, in a company based west of London, then scrambled, in an unforgivingly tight rental market, to find us somewhere to live nearby. By the time we were settled, a lengthy daily commute into London seemed overwhelming.<\/p>\n I also ran into a catch-22: even though I had been a member in good standing of the New Zealand journalists union, no paper or magazine in London would hire me unless I was a member of the British journalists union, and it was not possible to join that union without first having a job on a paper. When the local newspaper in Windsor turned me down for a posted job because I refused to promise not to get pregnant and \u2018waste their time,\u2019 I decided the best thing to do was to start work on my novel and to have another child. I believed, naively,\u00a0 that I could handle taking care of a child and having a writing career. In retrospect, any kind of job would have made better economic sense. We were desperately poor, but the dream of making my way as a writer still held.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t remember much of the plot of that first novel. Two main characters were New Zealand immigrants to England, like ourselves. There was also another couple, and some symmetry of cross-coupling, probably influenced by the Iris Murdoch<\/a> novels I was reading. I remember feeling uneasy that the plot line was uncovering a sense of dissatisfaction and disillusionment in my own life and that I didn\u2019t know how to resolve the story.<\/p>\n<\/a>