Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf : Masks and self-identities

This paper investigates the relationship between the two modernist writers Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. The two authors had a frail and complicated friendship that influenced their fiction and fictional characters more than the general public knows. My paper investigates how Woolf can have found her fictional story ideas direct from their friendship. With a comparative theory I’m finding and giving examples of how their friendship is reflected in their fictional stories, and I’m backing up my examples with citations from their own diaries, letters and notebooks. Another important part in my paper is the theme of masks and multiple identities. The two authors both expressed the need to hide behind different masks in order to please the society and their surroundings. This feeling, and this theme of multi pleidentities, also shines through in their fiction, and I will exemplify it with parts from their novels and short stories, and also develop my own thoughts on why they felt the need to use these false masks