ISSN 2040-2597 (Online)

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Issue 5 April 2010

Inside:

KMS News and Competition Results Page 2

‘Peacock’s Day’ by Quentin Furlong Page 3-5

‘At Katherine’s Bay’ by Maggie Rainey- Smith Page 6

‘Something Childish but Very Natural’ by Gary Abrahams Page 7-10

‘Katherine Mansfield, the Underworld and the Blooms Berries’ Page 11

Gerri Kimber speaks at the Godolphin and Latymer School Page 12

Westonbirt lecture Page 13

Book Announcements Page 14-15

Conference Announcements Luisa Hastings Edge as Mrs Dove in the 2006 London production of Page 16 Gary Abrahams’ Something Natural but Very Childish

Issue 5 April 2010 Page 2 KMS News

This issue is for the creative types among us. We feature a poem, ‘At Katherine’s Bay’, from KMS member Maggie Rainey-Smith, a Wellington writer and kayaker (check out the photo of KM’s holi- day home on page 6). We also bring you two articles by artists who are reworking KM’s stories in new ways. Filmmaker Quentin Furlong discusses her new short film ‘Peacock’s Day’, adapted from the story ‘Reginald Peacock’s Day’, set and shot in Dunedin and due for release in 2011. She has promised to keep those of us not fortunate enough to be there posted about a possible DVD release. Actor and theatre director Gary Abrahams also discusses the artistic processes that went into his play ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’ to be performed at La Mama theatre in Melbourne next month. La Mama is offering a discounted ticket price for KMS members (details are on page 10). Next month also brings the ‘Katherine Mansfield, the ‘Underworld’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’’ Sym- posium at RMIT University in Melbourne. Our own Honorary President Vincent O’Sullivan will be giving a keynote address, and KMS members Susannah Fullerton and Penelope Jackson will give feature presentations on Mansfield’s life and works, and portraits of KM. Registration is now open and details are on page 11. The Symposium could be a great way to introduce a friend to KM. Inside you will also find two reports of lectures given by our Chair, Gerri Kimber, and an announce- ment of the impending publication of Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public by our very own Jenny McDonnell (congratulations Jenny!). Happy reading for the next few months and we look forward to bringing you news of the Symposium in September. Sarah Ailwood and Jenny McDonnell, Joint Editors of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter

STOP PRESS!

KMS members in New Zealand and Australia can help generate revenue for the KMS by using Fishpond.co.nz – New Zealand’s biggest on-line store – for all book, DVD and music purchases. 10% of your purchase price will be donated to the KMS.

Please use the following link: http://www.fishpond.co.nz/index.php?ref=2186&affiliate_banner_id=38

Alternatively, go to the ‘Support us’ page of the KMS website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/support-us/ and click on the ‘fishpond logo’.

NB: only these methods will activate our affiliation link and generate revenue for the Society. Keep this info handy near your computer, and remember – before ordering anything from Fishpond – think KMS and go to our link!!

Competition results

In our last issue we invited members to tell us where they find Katherine Mansfield—to go into a draw to win a copy of Susannah Fullerton’s CD Finding Katherine Mansfield. Our winning entry was received from Melissa Reimer: ‘For me Katherine Mansfield is in "the people – and at night from the top of the tram – the lighted interiors of houses – you know the effect – people gathered round a lamp lighted table – a little, homely café – a laundry – a china shop – or at the corners the old chestnut sellers" (CL1:77-78), KM to Garnett Trowell, 24 October 1908, from Paris’. Congratulations Melissa—a copy of Susannah’s wonderful CD is in the post.

Published by the Katherine Mansfield Society, Stroud, England

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Peacock’s Day By Quentin Furlong

Last month I received a call from KMS member Judy Wilson in Auckland, who had tracked me down in Dunedin after hearing about my new film, Peacock’s Day. She in turn had been alerted to the film by Gerri Kimber in London. This was my introduction to the Katherine Mansfield Society, and I was quite impressed with the Society’s sleuthing capabilities – or as Judy said, “Our spies are everywhere!”

The Countess (Goeknil Meryem Biner), Mr. Peacock (Robert Tucker) and Betty (Aislinn Furlong) © PicturesQue Films

Peacock’s Day is a short film adaptation of Katherine Mansfield’s 1917 story, ‘Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day’. As those familiar with the story will recall, Mr. Peacock is a gifted but pompous singer and music teacher who has difficulty reconciling life’s daily realities (marriage, a child and the drudgery of household routine) with his artistic sensibilities (public acclaim and the doting admiration of his female students and fans).

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As a friend of mine (a KM devotee) said only half jokingly, “This is one of KM’s few non- depressing stories.” It is a delightful and entertaining story but often seems to be interpreted with a broad brush and with Mr. Peacock made a caricature. I believe Katherine Mansfield crafted this story more subtly and that she achieved a certain poignancy with her characters, perhaps reflecting her own experience as an artist in facing the “sordid details of existence” as Mr. Peacock calls them.

It has been theorized that KM based aspects of the character of Mr. Peacock on George Bowden, who was a professional singer. In Katherine Mansfield’s Men: Perspectives from the Katherine Mansfield Lecture Series (ed. Charles Ferrall and Jane Stafford, publ. by the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society, Wellington, 2005) John Middleton Murry is quoted as describing Bowden as “The gentleman artist with the bedside manner of the type after- wards depicted in ‘Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day.’”

Aenone Fell (Terry MacTavish), Mr. Peacock (Robert Tucker) and Lord Timbuck (Dave Hunt) © PicturesQue Films

My concept for the film was to reset Katherine Mansfield’s story in her homeland, giving it a distinctive New Zealand stamp, through the locations, music and artists chosen. The story lends itself beautifully to a 1918-1920s Dunedin setting. (Dunedin is a vibrant university city in the South Island of New Zealand with a rich cultural heritage.) Several Dunedin architec- tural jewels were selected for the interior scenes of the film.

I wanted to emphasize the musical elements to the story and decided to give the film an op- eratic twist. Opera singers Robert Tucker (who is currently based in the UK and has just completed a tour with Scottish Opera) and Anna Leese (now in Belgium performing the role of Tatyana in Eugene Onegin for Vlaamse Opera), both formerly from Dunedin, were back in New Zealand in December, performing in various Messiah’s, and we were able to sched- ule filming in a narrow time frame just before Christmas. Composer Anthony Ritchie and

Issue 5 April 2010 Page 5 pianist Tom McGrath, and soprano Goeknil Meryem Biner rounded out our array of talented professionals.

Marian (Anna Leese) and Mr. Peacock (Robert Tucker) © PicturesQue Films

In the course of one day, Mr. Peacock (Robert Tucker) interacts with his family as he con- ducts lessons with each of three students, the shy ingénue Betty Brickle (Aislinn Furlong), the dramatic and eccentric Countess (Goeknil Meryem Biner) and the sentimental diva, Miss Marian Morrow (Anna Leese). Each lesson is an opportunity to feature the musicality of the talented cast. The character of a devoted fan, Aenone Fell (Terry MacTavish), is subtly woven into the tapestry of the day and serves as a further magnet, pulling Mr. Peacock away from his wife (Emma Fraser) and son (Josh Meikle).

Not intended as a “museum piece”, Peacock’s Day gives the essential Mansfield elements a fresh and contemporary treatment while still retaining classical period details. The film is a duet of drama and comedy with the action driven by the artistry of music.

The film is currently in post-production and will soon be submitted to film festivals interna- tionally. It will be publicly screened in Dunedin in 2011, and (depending on distribution pos- sibilities) will also be made available overseas. We intend to produce a DVD and will keep the KMS updated.

Quentin (Quenne) Furlong, originally from the United States, has lived in New Zealand for almost five years. She is a professional photographer and filmmaker and the founder of PicturesQue Films Trust, a recently formed trust dedicated to the production of quality art films with an emphasis on literature and music. Please feel free to contact her at the following e-mail address: [email protected]

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At Katherine’s Bay

Water washes over the road at Eastbourne while

latte spume licks the heels of city jeeps. The southerly lifts sand

and little blue penguins invade the investment, once were holiday homes

where Katherine stayed and Stanley Burnell’s children played their part,

native bush and real estate collide in Sunday kaleidoscope sunshine.

Jonathan Trout isn’t shouting out from the waves nowadays

he sits instead, in the shelter of the boatshed and watches Stanley catch the ferry.

Linda feasts on eggs florentine and Beryl’s no longer afraid

the Kembers’ brittle laughter can be heard over barbecues

and in the bush, if you listen carefully from somewhere in the shadows

you can hear Jonathan saying, It’s all wrong, it’s all wrong.

Maggie Rainey-Smith

Biography:

I am a local Wellington writer who fell into KM fever as an adult student returning to university to complete a BA (English Literature). It is my good fortune to live in Days Bay and to look out over to the house where Katherine holidayed with her fam- ily. On the wall in my writing study, is a New Zea- land Book Council poster charting the life of KM and a picture of her is my screen saver on my com- puter. My email address is [email protected].

Maggie Rainey-Smith kayaking in front of KM’s holiday home at My poem is a response to KM’s story “At the Bay”. Days Bay

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‘SOMETHING NATURAL BUT VERY CHILDISH’

Exploring the short stories of Katherine Mansfield for the stage.

By Gary Abrahams

I first encountered Katherine Mansfield’s work when I was nineteen years old and had just moved to Melbourne from Johannesburg in order to begin a three-year actor’s training course at The Victorian College of the Arts. A distant cousin had given me a pocket-sized anthology of some of her stories as a parting gift. I’ve since misplaced the book (as happens all too often when you have a tendency to move houses, cities and countries quite fre- quently) but if I recall correctly the tiny volume contained the stories ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, ‘Bliss’, ‘The Garden Party; and ‘The Escape’. My initial response to her work was one of delight. My young mind was instantly amused at the precise and affectionate ren- derings of her characters. To this day ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ remains one of my favourite of her works. The finicky, anxious, suspicious and bewildered nature of the two spinsters never fails to amuse me. For some unknown reason I seem to completely under- stand them, to know them and love in them their eccentric peculiarities. In fact, it is often this that attracts me to her writing; her unerring ability to drop the reader into the centre of a character and keep us there for a few moments, only a few – just long enough for the story to be told – to keep us so firmly and clearly in the centre of a character that for a few pages we see the world through their eyes, so clearly, so precisely, and through them we notice the tea- cup, the cake, the flower, the button hole, the pear tree, the little light in a doll’s house – whatever it is that must be noticed – and a revelation occurs to us and to the character and together we know that something has happened, some unexplainable “thing” has occurred that will change everything after. Or at least that is how it seems to me.

A few years later I stumbled across a much larger anthol- ogy of her writing, The Col- lected Stories published in 2001 by Penguin Books, and immediately bought it. The discovery came at a very particular time; I was heart- broken in that way that only a young person in their early twenties can be and I wanted to do nothing more than mope around and stay in- doors reading. Upon devour- ing the anthology I was im- Liam Bewley and Luisa Hastings Edge—Mr and Mrs Dove mediately struck by her pre- occupation with love and her

Issue 5 April 2010 Page 8 own exploration into the nature of the fantasy of love present throughout so many of her sto- ries. I also became enamoured with so many of her characters and the wonderful way she has of describing them from the inside out. Reading her work I seldom feel as if I am meeting a character from an objective stance and having said character described to me by the author. Rather, as I read, I feel as if I am dropped into the character, deep inside them and I am made to feel them first, feel as ‘they’ feel, feel their feelings, feel their thoughts, feel their hope, and love, and fear and anxiety. All this ‘feeling’ – it undoubtedly appealed to the actor inside of me. And it also made me feel as if I knew the writer, intimately. And this was a great comfort. Because here, finally, was someone who thought as I thought, who felt as I felt and understood the world as I did. Or so it seemed to my indulgent, melancholic self.

I became an avid fan and carried the anthology with me always. In fact it is one of my most treasured books. I read from it frequently and never fail to be literally startled at some of her turns of phrase and descriptions – sentences whose words hang together like jewels on a necklace. I find her writing genuinely funny and utterly endearing, and of course, very, very clever. As I grow older and keep returning to the work I uncover deeper and deeper layers of psychological complexity within the relationships and stories and I still find her writing to be a great comfort to me, particularly in periods where I feel as if all the poetic and beautiful things have been bulldozed out of existence.

I began toying with the idea of working with her work theatrically many years ago, proba- bly in around 2003. Even though I worked predominantly as an actor I still dabbled in a little bit of writing. I have always been fasci- nated by the idea of adaptation and the notion of metamorphosing one type of artwork into another, and I initially just wanted to look at the story ‘Something Childish but very Natu- ral’. I was very preoccupied with the notion of love and love’s bitter disappointments and the fatalistic idea of love I had at that point, Evie Dawnay and Tom McLane—The Blaze and the story of Henry and Edna seemed to encapsulate so much the childish fantasy of love I was trying to understand in myself. But as I began to draft my adaptation other ideas started to suggest themselves. There seemed to me to be so many of her stories that explored similar themes from a variety of angles and I be- gan to examine all the stories in earnest, searching for narratives, characters and moments that dealt with the fantasy of love. My initial idea began to morph as I kept uncovering phrases and moments from so many stories that I wanted to use. The initial phase was like putting together a thematic puzzle, finding ways in which I might make the stories weave together and intertwine with each other. I toyed with the ideas of lifting characters from cer- tain stories and placing them in others, I examined which characters shared similarities with others, how I might construct alternate narratives by piecing together separate stories and if there were paragraphs of speech that could be borrowed by characters without it feeling clumsy. At first all this was really just a hobby, a way for me to occupy my time while my heart mended. I didn’t truly have any great aspirations for the work or myself as a theatre maker at that point. It wasn’t until a few years later while I was living in London that I first

Issue 5 April 2010 Page 9 showed the work to anyone, and their response is ultimately what has brought me here now, to the upcoming season at La Mama.

A version of the work was first produced (by the artists involved) at The Hen and Chicken Theatre in Islington in 2006. It is a tiny independent theatre located in a loft up one hundred dingy stairs. It was a wonderful experience; my first full length play as writer and director (I had written short plays before that and had several monologues of mine commissioned by The London Institute of Contemporary Art for a series of performances). That version of the work was very young, as was I, but it did receive a very warm reception and rave reviews. I had woven some of my own writing into the narrative and ultimately created a piece that used her writing to tell the story of three pairs of would-be lovers in London in 1910 and my own writing to juxtapose this with a story of a heartbroken man in contemporary London. The work as a whole struck a chord with an audience and I feel in a way I did a fair job in remaining faithful to her writing, her style and her characters. Henry and Edna remained as the central characters, but other works that were looked at included ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, ‘A Dill Pickle’ and ‘The Escape’.

I returned to Melbourne in 2007 to undertake a post- graduate degree in Theatre Making at the VCA, fol- lowed by my Masters in Writing and Directing, spe- cialising in the art of adaptation. My Masters work was an adaptation of the James Baldwin novella Gio- vanni’s Room. The resulting play, entitled “Acts of Deceit Between Strangers in a Room” enjoyed a very successful season at La Mama earlier this year. It was while doing this that I approached Liz Jones (the ar- tistic director of La Mama Theatre) about my Kathe- rine Mansfield show. As fate would have it a slot opened up at the theatre to coincide with the sympo- sium being held at RMIT and the next stage in this work began. It was never my intention to restage the London version of the show. Rather, I wanted to re- turn to the original source material and re-examine how I could work with it theatrically, utilising all I had learned while completing my Master studies. Re- turning to her stories with a more mature mind and understanding of theatrical practice opened up a whole range of possibilities. I began to pay more at- Nina Fry and Henry Doulton—Henry and Edna tention to her exquisite descriptions of gesture and the acute physicality of characters, and to search for ways of balancing the youthfulness of ‘Something Childish but very Natural’ with more adult perspectives on love that occur in other stories. I have also chosen to do away with the contemporary character and my own writing.

The ensemble and I are in the midst of creating the show now and as yet have no clear vision of exactly what the result might be. It is of course terrifying, but also liberating. What fasci- nates me about working in this way is the meeting of artistic minds to wrestle with grand

Issue 5 April 2010 Page 10 themes and notions about love, life and the chronic dissatisfaction that plagues us all. The act of adaptation requires me to wrestle with Katherine Mansfield and examine where our fasci- nations and obsessions meet and where they differ. As an artist I need to find where I can use her work to explore my own ideas, and how to use her writing as a platform for the acting ensemble to wrestle with their own ideas and concepts about the fantasy of love. The result can only be an intimate collaboration; a collaboration between Ms Mansfield as a writer, my- self as a theatre maker and the ensemble as physical performers who will attempt to embody her characters. I have chosen to title the work “Something Natural but very Childish”, a play on her title for the story of Henry and Edna, and a title which I intend to hint at the overall tone of our work and the discoveries we are making.

To make a new work of theatre has to be a personal experience, and in the case of adaptation it can only be born from a very personal attachment to the work. I love her writing as much now as I ever did, and I look forward to showing the work to her existing fans as much as to introducing her to audiences that may not yet be familiar with her writing. Whatever the re- sult of this creative process I am certain that her spirit will come through strong, and it has been a joy to have the opportunity to return to the wonderful worlds she has created.

SOMETHING NATURAL, BUT VERY CHILDISH

Written & directed by Gary Abrahams Original Music Composed by Alison Beckett (a dirty pretty theatre production)

“I wish I had taken poison and were about to die.” “Why do you say that? You should never say that.” “Because I know I am going to love you too much – far too much. And I shall suffer so terribly, because you never, never will love me.”

La Mama Theatre—25 Faraday Street, Carlton Opening Wed June 2, running till June 20; Tues, Wed & Sun 6.30p.m; Thurs-Sat 8p.m $25 full/$15 concession and KM Society Members

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The Godolphin and Latymer School, London 11th February 2010

Sixth form girls at Godolphin and Latymer School, with KMS member Lesley Sharpe

Some of our lucky LVI girls who have been studying Katherine Mansfield for their AS level course- work enjoyed a lecture and PowerPoint presentation specially prepared for them by Gerri Kimber. Gerri was, of course, a brilliant speaker, and the 48 slides brought everything to life even more fully for the girls.

Some of their thoughts on the morning…

‘Thank you so much… it was very useful and interesting. What struck me was that her stories were so autobiographical and that even the characters names were so similar. And what I hadn’t really thought about before was the way the aloe was a sexual symbol for Linda as well as a symbol of escape, which is another interesting idea that could be explored in terms of the plant’s connection with the female conscious- ness throughout these stories.’ Bella Pringle

‘I really enjoyed the talk and found it a really interesting insight into the life and works of Katherine Mansfield (especially ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’). What I found most interesting was finding out the connections that the characters in ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ had with Katherine Mansfield’s real-life family; I knew that there were some links, however I did not realise that it was to such a great extent.’ Natasha Hachem

‘Thank you so much…I found it really useful, especially in terms of learning about the effect that Mansfield’s life and surroundings had on her writing. I had no idea how autobiographical her stories actually are! Also I was really interested in hearing about the structure of Mansfield’s writing and the devices she used in her short stories.’ Josie Sacks

Gerri herself said that ‘it was a real pleasure to have such an engaged audience, and to have the opportunity of extending the girls’ knowledge and interest in Katherine Mansfield. Part of the remit of the Society is to create an educational strategy to foster an appreciation and understanding of Mansfield and to ensure her place on school curricula’, a project which is well underway! Lesley Sharpe

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Report on Public Lecture by Gerri Kimber at Westonbirt School

On Friday 12th March, Gerri Kimber was the invited speaker for a public lecture at Weston- birt School, Gloucestershire. The lecture attracted a full hall of members of the public whilst pupils from the school filled the gallery. Janet Wilson, Kevin Ireland, Janine Renshaw- Beauchamp and Delia da Sousa Correa were in attendance to represent the Katherine Mans- field Society.

Janine Renshaw-Beauchamp, Delia da Sousa Gerri Kimber with Lord Moyne (Jonathan Correa, Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber Guinness, son of Diana Mitford)

Gerri’s lecture was a vivacious overview of Mans- field’s life and achievements, and discussed her asso- ciation with other artists connected to Bloomsbury. It was copiously illustrated with slides of Mansfield, the artists and writers she knew, works by modernist artists such as J. D. Fergusson and later illustrators of Mans- field’s work. Gerri wound up with readings from ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Life of Ma Parker’

The audience’s enjoyment of Gerri’s lecture and ab- sorbed attention during her readings from Mansfield were palpable and questions included a thoughtful query from the gallery about whether Mansfield was a feminist. Westonbirt pupils will have been inspired to read Mansfield and the lecture, together with Gerri’s previous lecture for pupils Godolphin and Latimer school in London, looks ahead to the KMS’s planned campaign to promote the study of Mansfield’s writing Janine Renshaw-Beauchamp and Gerri in secondary schools. Kimber pictured with KM’s dress Photo by Kevin Ireland The event was a great success in itself and a retiring collection raised much needed funds for our still-new Katherine Mansfield Society. Well done Gerri and Thank You!

Delia da Sousa Correa

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Book announcements

Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915-1962

Anna Jackson (London: Routledge, 2010)

ISBN: 978-0415998314, 186 pages

Release date: April 2010

The diary is a genre that is often thought of as virtually formless, a “capacious hold-all” for the writer’s thoughts, and as offering unmediated access to the diarist’s true self. Focusing on the diaries of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Joe Orton, John Cheever, and Sylvia Plath, this book looks at how six very different professional writers have approached the diary form with its particular demands and literary potential. As a sequence of separate entries the diary is made up of both gaps and continuities, and the different ways diarists negotiate these aspects of the diary form has radical effects on how their diaries represent both the world and the biographical self. The differ- ent published editions of the diaries by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath show how editorial decisions can construct sometimes startlingly different biographical portraits. Yet all diaries are constructed, and all diary constructions depend on how the writer works with the diary form.

Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public

Jenny McDonnell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

ISBN: 978-0230234796, 232 pages

Release date: July 2010

Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace provides the first comprehensive study of Mansfield’s career as a professional writer in a commercial literary world, during the years that saw the emergence and consolidation of literary modernism in Britain. It draws on recent critical trends in the field of material modernist studies to posit a new reading of her stories and their location within a modernist marketplace. Mansfield’s association with periodicals such as the New Age, Rhythm and the Athenaeum, and with the Hogarth Press, are illustrative of her use of key modes that aided the development and dissemination of modernist texts between the years 1910 and 1922. At the same time, she took increasing advantage of popular publishing in illustrated newspapers and maga- zines. The book argues that these publishing contexts shaped Mansfield’s development as a writer, and presents a new interpretation of her stories’ enactment of a commercially viable modernist aes- thetic.

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‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’ Centenary reflections and contemporary debates: modernism and beyond

British Association of Modernist Studies Inaugural Conference 10th-12th December 2010. University of Glasgow, U.K.

[I]t would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character- reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our busi- ness largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help. And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. (Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 1923)

This inaugural conference of the British Association of Modernist Studies and Scottish Net- work of Modernist Studies is based around Virginia Woolf’s famous and controversial state- ment in an essay of 1923, often taken as indicating a possible starting-point for modernity, that ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed.’ Confirmed plenary speakers: · Professor Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) · Professor Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh) · Professor David Peters Corbett (University of York) · Introductory address: Professor Laura Marcus (University of Edinburgh) For details visit http://www.bams.me.uk/?q=events/conferences/bams_2010

Australian Modernist Studies Network

The Australian Modernist Studies Network (AMSN) was established in July 2009 to support re- search activity in modernist studies throughout Australia.

The AMSN seeks to engage academics, postgraduate students and those outside the academy who work in any of the various international denominations of modernism.

The Network’s website is now available at www.amsn.org.au, and contains information on Austra- lian modernist studies events, calls for papers, links to Australian and international modernist studies resources, and details of the research interests of the Network’s membership.

The Network is free to join and open to all scholars working in modernist studies. We invite any in- terested individuals to visit the website to submit their details.