24 August and 7 September 1911

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or about 1910 human character changed.” Yet for her friend Katherine Mansfield, it was not 1910 but 1911 that marked a change, as she met her second husband and future editor of the Athenaeum John Middleton Murry. Mansfield embarked with Murry on a series of editing and reviewing jobs, first for the little magazines Rhythm and the Blue Review, and then for the Athenaeum. Moreover, 1911 marked the publication of her first collection of short stories In a German Pension, based on her travels in Europe. Many of these stories had first appeared in A.R. Orage’s socialist weekly the New Age, or the No Wage as Orage jokingly called it. Two of them—“The Journey to Bruges” and “Being a Truthful Adventure”—chronicle Mansfield’s travels to Belgium. They show her developing modernist style and critique relations of gender, class, and nation. More particularly, they engage with the women’s vote, already established in Mansfield’s native New Zealand in 1893 yet only fully introduced in Britain twenty-five years later.