China and the West

Ren, Rongzhen. Mansifei'erde he ta de duan pian xiao shuo [ID D30062].
"All writer, in creating their fictional characters, betray, consciously or not, their own characteristics, leaving a complete portrait of themselves to their readers. There are often many specific and internal connections between the images of fictional characters from Katherine Mansfield's pen and her self-portrait revealed by those images... Mansfield's wandering life, sickly constitution, and feeling of loneliness determined her ideological inclination : opposing social injustice and war, and sympathizing with the weak and ordinary working people. Most of her characters are female, and a great part are women from the lower stratum of society… All of her characters are non-heroic figures of ordinary common people, dissatisfied with the imperfection of real life or feeling resentful toward the dark side of society… The sense of loneliness occupied a prominent position in her mind when she entered the stage of maturity… Her career did not start off smoothly, and with it came upheavals and poverty in life as well as frustration in love affairs. All this produced in her a sense of disillusionment, which would naturally have an effect on her characters… Mansfield's fiction has been well-known for its fine, accurate description of psychology and for its interior monologue… Another important artistic feature of her work is that hers is a language with a strong sense of colour, also a characteristic of twentieth century Western literature. Her language of fiction, marked by the conciseness of English poetry as well as by the exquisiteness of prose, flows smoothly, naturally forming an integral whole."