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Passionate Pilgrimage: A Love Affair in Letters: Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry from the South of France, 1915-1920
Passionate Pilgrimage A Love Affair in Letters Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry from the South of France 19151920 Author:Katherine Mansfield "This place is so full of our love that every little walk I take is a passionate pilgrimage." So wrote Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murray in 1915. — When Katherine Mansfield first came to the South of France in 1915 she was suffering from a weakness of the chest. When she finally left in 1921 she was dying of tuberculosis. Wha... more »t lay between were four flight from English winters, during which she wrote to Murray every day, sometimes twice a day, letter which have been called the novel she never wrote. Passionate Pilgrimage is a story of their love affair -- an affair between two people who chose to live a thousand miles apart -- seen through the letter of Katherine Mansfield and her surroundings in the South of France which coloured her moods and her writing. Katherine was no unwilling exile: "when I heard the medicine man say, "You ought to go to some place like Tenerife or Madeira, but as you can't go there, Spain or the South of France will do," I would not have swapped my lung with any man alive." Murray, critic, scholar, a man of Himalayan earnestness, was incapable of leaving London.
Katherine Mansfield's letters are funny, tender, poignant; no one since Colette has evoked the South of France as she did. Helen McNeish's photographs capture perfectly their mood and imagery, as well as the country which Katherine knew and loved.« less