“you’ll cry me very vague & dismiss me … as a woman with an ill regulated mind”

Russell’s first impression of the young New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was not favourable. She had been living in England for a number of years and had become a friend of D.H. Lawrence, who introduced Russell to her in July 1915. Of that meeting, which also included Mansfield’s future husband, John Middleton Murry, Russell recounted in a letter to his lover, Ottoline Morell: “they were all sitting together in a bare office … with the windows shut, smoking Russian cigarettes without a moment’s intermission, idle and cynical. I thought … the whole atmosphere ... dead and putrefying.”

Over the course of the next year and a half, Russell would come to change his mind about Mansfield. Their paths would begin to cross more frequently as Mansfield became entwined with the Bloomsbury group and was invited to visit Garsington, Ottoline’s country estate. Russell would tell Ottoline in December 1916: “I want to get to know Katherine Mansfield really well. She interests me mentally very much indeed—I think she has a very good mind, and I like her boundless curiosity.” Russell and Mansfield’s intense late-night conversations at Garsington, their meetings in London, and their exchange of letters led Ottoline to feel jealous and suspicious, and some of the Bloomsberries to suspect they were having an affair.

Russell was, indeed, having an affair that he was keeping secret from Ottoline for the time being, but it was not with Mansfield. Rather, Russell had become involved with another young, passionate woman, Lady Constance Malleson, the actress who went by the stage name Colette O’Niel (see Letter 14). For a while, Russell had been feeling that Ottoline was losing interest in him, and while in the United States in the spring of 1914, he had begun a disastrous affair with Helen Dudley of Chicago. The relationship with Colette, on the other hand, would become one of the most significant of Russell’s life. In the fall of 1916, however, he wondered if the much younger Colette—she was just turning 21, he was 44—might not be serious enough for him. Perhaps Russell viewed Mansfield’s “good mind” as a balance of sorts. She loved discussing ideas with him, especially about her writing, and also admired and looked up to Russell, at least initially.

Unfortunately, Russell’s letters to Mansfield have not survived, but a dozen letters from Mansfield to Russell are available in the Russell archives. They reveal her admiration for him and sometimes, as in this letter, a concern for how he perceives her: “you'll cry me very vague & dismiss me perhaps as a woman with an ill regulated mind.” The letters are also full of intellectual curiosity and are frequently passionate and intimate. As Russell himself noted when coming across the letters again in 1949: “They read as if we were having an affair, or about to have one, but it was not so. My feelings for her were ambivalent; I admired her passionately, but was repelled by her dark hatreds.” As he said further in his Autobiography: “Her talk was marvellous, much better than her writing, especially when she was telling of things that she was going to write, but when she spoke about people she was envious, dark, and full of alarming penetration in discovering what they least wished known and whatever was bad in their characteristics.”

The initial allure wore off for both Russell and Mansfield by 1917. Six years later, Mansfield died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.

Sources: (1) Bertrand Russell. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944 (Volume II). London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968; includes Russell’s July 1915 letter to Ottoline Morrell. (2) Nicholas Griffin, ed. The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970. London and New York: Routledge, 2002; includes Russell’s December 1916 letter to Ottoline Morrell, and Russell’s 1949 comment about Mansfield. (3) Antony Alpers. The Life of Katherine Mansfield, New York: The Viking Press, 1980. (4) Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 1. Oxford University Press, 1984.