Abstract

Reversion to Childhood

The article discusses the book " The Aloe," by Katherine Mansfield, with an introduction by J. Middleton Murry. Whether viewed as finished writing or as tentative material, the four sketches of the Burnell family presented in the book are moving and delightful. For the glimpse of the character Linda's father and her courting in Australia by another character Stanley Burnell one cannot be too grateful, as also for the fresh encounter with Mansfield's prose. The prose style is inescapably feminine, soft, tender, hovering, a butterfly style, which hardly brushes with its wings flowers of sentimentality, a style whose breathiness, whose rhythms of light excitement seem to catch something of the quality of schoolgirl conversation. It is a style so innocent, artful in its nostalgia that it evokes always the vague enchantment of ones own childhood.