Deborah Friedell in The London Review of Books:
Virginia Woolf wasn’t sure what she felt when she heard that Katherine Mansfield was dead. The cook, ‘in her sensational way’, had broken the news to her at breakfast: ‘Mrs Murry’s dead! It says so in the paper!’
At that one feels – what? A shock of relief? – a rival the less? Then confusion at feeling so little – then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression which I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.
While Mansfield was alive, Woolf had found her ‘cheap and hard’, ‘unpleasant’ and ‘utterly unscrupulous’. It bothered her that she wasn’t sure if Mansfield liked her – letters and invitations often went unanswered. And she sensed that Mansfield was holding something back: ‘We did not ever coalesce.’ But, on balance, she hadn’t wanted her dead, even if she had sometimes wished that she didn’t exist: ‘Damn Katherine! Why can’t I be the only woman who knows how to write?’ She decided that she would have preferred for Mansfield to ‘have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more gifted – that wd. only have become more & more apparent’.
And on Mansfield’s side? ‘How I envy Virginia; no wonder she can write,’ she told her husband, angry that he wouldn’t take care of her the way that Leonard Woolf took care of his wife. ‘That’s one thing I shall grudge Virginia all her days – that she & Leonard were together.’
More here.