Katherine, great talent and need for good

Nadia Fusini “The Daughter of the Sun -Burning Life of Katherine Mansfield” Feltrinelli 2023

Through a literary device, Nadia Fusini, one of the most knowledgeable scholars of Shakespeare and English literature, whom I have heard speak here in the Monastery, acquaints us with the short but ardent existential journey of the writer KM (that’s how she wanted to be addressed). At just 34 years of age, her life was cut short by consumption in 1923. She was a woman hungry for life and love, who was able to write pages upon pages (many of which have been destroyed) to exorcise the death that like a dark shadow hung over her for five years.

As an essayist, journalist and author of short stories, KM’s life was full of writing. A body of work made up of visions and profound research as if suspended between the intense desire for life and the awareness of near death. An ardent life that ended in an equally peculiar way, in a commune founded by the Russian mystic, Gurdjieff, outside Paris where she stopped writing because perhaps she found among the residents (although according to some critics in an unhealthy and manipulative way) what writing, while involving her so much, was unable to give her, which was someone who truly loved her.

Rosa Lupoli is a Capuchin nun from Naples, the abbess of the Santa Maria in Gerusalemme monastery known as the Trentatrè, founded by Blessed Maria Lorenza Longo