Katherine Mansfield, fairy tales and fir trees: “the story is past too: past! past! - that’s the way with all stories”

In 1908, Katherine Mansfield wrote to her sister, Vera: ‘Have you lately read Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales? If you have a copy in the house do look up the Fir Tree. The last sentence is so astonishingly Chopin I read it over & over – and the simple unearthly words flood your soul like the dying phrase of a Majorca nocturne’. The miserable fate of the lonely fir tree in Andersen’s fairy tale echoed her own situation at that time, desperate to return to England and not knowing if her father would give his consent. As a child, Mansfield was an avid reader of fairy tales. A friend recorded: ‘We read and reread Grimms and Hans Andersen’s fairy tales, The Princess and the Goblins, Alice in Wonderland of course, and a book we liked very much called Christmas Tree Land’. Mrs Molesworth’s enormously popular children’s book, Christmas-Tree Land (1884), was didactic in tone, but its fantasy element nevertheless thrilled young readers – as it clearly did Mansfield – who revelled in the fairy-tale adventures of its brother and sister protagonists, Rollo and Maia. Fir trees are the most dominant feature of the book: ‘And far as the eye could reach stretched away into the distance, miles and miles and miles, here rising, there again sweeping downwards, the everlasting Christmas-trees!’ Mansfield seemingly never forgot this book; though none of her extant writings mention it specifically (as was the case with almost everything she read as a child), nevertheless, resonances are to be found scattered throughout her work. Indeed, fir trees, pine trees, litter Mansfield’s adolescent – and adult – consciousness in a quite remarkable way, as this paper will reveal.