Katherine Mansfield Quotes
You are a Queen. Let mine be the joy of giving you your kingdom.
Mansfield, Katherine. The Journal of Katherine Mansfield. Edited by J. Middleton Murry, Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
After the King’s appointment in 1921 she “advised” him on establishing this regime and operating the government. At a time that women could not even vote in England, Bell was a kingmaker and major power in an area of the world that was much more sexist than England at the time.
West Saxons had a bad experience with a “Queen” who was not very good. This quotation illustrates that the institutions of monarchy varied from time to time and place to place, just like democracies that have many differences among them.
The Princess was Victoria who was to become the Sovereign of England but at the time was only 11 years old. The Duchess was her mother and guardian and responsible for her upbringing and education. However, note that because a future sovereign was involved, the official Church of England was required by the existing law to provide oversight to her upbringing, and this memo was one of the Duchess’s periodic report to the Church. Also it is interesting that this young princess, destined to be the most powerful person in the world at the time, was brought up to “live for others” and not to be pompous or dazzled with power. The Duchess did a terrific job because not only was Victoria to reign over the British Empire for 62 years, but Queen Victoria is regarded by many historians as one of the best, if not the best, monarch who ever reigned anywhere.
King Henry VII had only 1 son, Edward who became king at age 9. But at the age 15 he became very ill and died with no children. Before his death however, Mary who would normally have been the next in line was a Catholic and Northumberland, the head of the Privy Counselor, and father of Jane’s Husband arranged for Edward to change his will before he died. Jane Grey riled for 9 days. Parliament then made Mary the Queen.
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent modernist writer who was born and brought up in New Zealand. She wrote short stories and poetry under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, she left colonial New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917 and she died in France aged 34.
