But now scholars have to contend with a sworn affidavit which complicates their thinking about Mansfield, who continues to exert an enduring fascination as a genius and a woman. Dr Gerri Kimber, Professor at the University of Northampton, has written and edited over 40 volumes on Mansfield, and is past president of the International Katherine Mansfield Society.
She is working on a new biography of Mansfield that will be published by Reaktion Books next year. I was very much attached to her and exerted myself to my utmost to gratify her. When I failed she told me that she would go elsewhere.
Against my remonstrances and entreaties she left me, and finally abandoned my home. He lost income, and had to flee England to find work. My domestic troubles impaired my ability to make a living at my profession and in the hope of bettering my financial position in a community where I was a stranger I took the advice of friends and came to California arriving in San Francisco towards the end of Beauchamp to Mr George C. Bowden, B. In the bedroom, with its pink-shaded lights and satin furniture, she changed abruptly and made it obvious that she was not prepared to consummate the marriageβ¦.
She departed in the night. The image of her fleeing in the dark makes for a good round full-stop to the marriage, but life is messier and stranger than that. What kind of man and wife?
Bowden has long since been scorned by Mansfield biographers as someone who she found repulsive. Bowden kept adding to the story throughout the years, but never deviating from the central issue that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. For reasons of her own which she never confided to me, she could not go through with it. A virgin marriage, chaste, in the friend zone. And now, suddenly, an affidavit stating that they most certainly had sex, quite a lot of sex actually, in fact too much sex for poor, exhausted Bowden.
