Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps for three years’. Intriguingly, Woolf imagined she might glimpse Mansfield, not in the drawing-room of a mutual friend or at a literary soirée, but ‘on a rock or in the sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.¹ Woolf pictures Mansfield in an attitude reminiscent of Frederic Leighton’s Solitude (1890), an allegorical painting of a ‘woman draped in white, sitting on a rock’ overlooking the sea, mentioned in Mansfield’s 1915 short story, ‘Autumns: II’.² This allusion reveals acute attention to Mansfield’s early work, as well as a tendency to imagine the New Zealand outsider in a liminal position, tricked out in classical trappings but on a promontory of her own. It seems that, for Woolf, Mansfield’s allure was mixed up with her air of solitude. Indeed, solitude would draw these writers together as a magnet, a fertile ground for ‘accost’. Woolf’s image proved strangely prescient as if, already attuned to the sound of ‘waves breaking’, she had somehow anticipated Mansfield’s declaration in her diary, ‘All that I write – all that I am – is on the border of the sea’.³

If Woolf assumed she could identify Mansfield as a ‘sign’ of solitude (not merely the signature of her own work, but a citation of longstanding pictorial traditions), it is worth recognising that we, their readers, also approach these figures through the iconography of solitude developed by their contemporaries and cultural legatees. For instance, when Mansfield’s husband John Middleton Murry edited her journal for posthumous publication, he presented Mansfield as the female isolate par excellence, adding subheadings like ‘Femme Seule’, ‘Being Alone’, and ‘Living Alone’.⁴ Similarly, in 1930, Cecil Beaton described Woolf as a fragile ‘sea-anemone’ that ‘curls up at contact with the outer world’, a marine image that influenced her popular representation for decades (despite her indignation), perhaps because it anticipated her suicide by drowning in 1941.⁵

Such early depictions of the modernist isolate – embracing the deluge alone with tragic but heroic determination – seem like caricatures, especially in light of recent scholarship on modernists’ efforts to develop meaningful forms of intimacy and public engagement.⁶ Nevertheless, in addition to complicating these stock images, we might consider how their crude outlines invite questions about the legibility and evasiveness of that ubiquitous affect we call ‘solitude’. The assumptions that colour Woolf’s imagined Mansfield – simultaneously, a distinctive body that can be recognised by virtue of her solitary position, and a generic genius loci – should alert us to how solitude is implicated in ‘the tension between personal expression and general convention’. Solitude is at once a passionate feeling of (or claim to) singularity, an uncompromised only-ness, and a culturally encoded ‘repertoire of actions and statements […] postures and signs’ that can evoke the heat of genuine frisson or seem like tepid clichés.⁷ In singling out the one, solitude gestures towards the universal, connoting island and ‘continent’, one Mansfield standing out to sea and ‘mortal millions that live alone’ in ‘the shoreless watery wild’.⁸ Solitude seems like a landscape where we travel alone but it is characterised by discursive landmarks and pocked with others’ steps. Thus, this paper not only traces the connections between Mansfield and Woolf’s thoughts on solitude, but also tracks their course through a wider cultural and literary horizon. Solitude emerges as a fluid network of feeling, characterised by expressive norms and emotional protocols that are ‘repeatedly undone by the very wildness’ of its ebbs and flows.⁹

在 1917 年他们相遇之前，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫 (Virginia Woolf) 为她第一次见到凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德 (Katherine Mansfield) 设想了一个奇特的环境，凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德是一位有前途的年轻作家，“她已经坚持了三年”。有趣的是，伍尔夫想象她可能会瞥见曼斯菲尔德，不是在共同朋友的客厅或文学晚会上，而是“在岩石上或在海上”——在那里，“我会和她搭话”。^{1伍尔夫以一种让人想起弗雷德里克·莱顿 (Frederic Leighton) 的}《孤独》 (1890)的态度来描绘曼斯菲尔德，这是一幅寓言画，描绘了一个“身披白衣的女人，坐在岩石上”俯瞰大海，曼斯菲尔德 1915 年的短篇小说《秋天：II》中提到过。²这一典故揭示了对曼斯菲尔德早期作品的敏锐关注，以及一种将新西兰局外人想象为处于阈限位置的倾向，她被古典服饰所欺骗，但在她自己的海角上。对于伍尔夫来说，曼斯菲尔德的魅力似乎与她的孤独气质混合在一起。事实上，孤独会像磁石一样将这些作家聚集在一起，成为“搭讪”的沃土。事实证明，伍尔夫的形象具有奇特的先见之明，就好像她已经适应了“海浪破碎”的声音，不知何故预见到了曼斯菲尔德在日记中的宣言：“我所写的一切——我的一切——都在大海的边界上”。³

如果伍尔夫认为她可以将曼斯菲尔德视为孤独的“标志”（不仅仅是她自己作品的签名，而是对长期绘画传统的引用），那么值得认识到的是，我们，他们的读者，也通过他们的同时代人和文化传承人开发的孤独图像来接近这些人物。例如，当曼斯菲尔德的丈夫约翰·米德尔顿·默里编辑她的日记以供死后出版时，他将曼斯菲尔德描述为卓越的女性隔离者，并添加了“女性Seule”、“孤独”和“独自生活”等小标题。⁴同样，1930 年，塞西尔·比顿 (Cecil Beaton) 将伍尔夫描述为一朵脆弱的“海葵”，“与外部世界接触时会蜷缩起来”，这种海洋形象影响了她数十年的公众形象（尽管她对此感到愤慨），也许是因为它预示了她在 1941 年溺水身亡。⁵

这种对现代主义孤立的早期描述——以悲惨但英勇的决心独自拥抱洪水——似乎是漫画，特别是考虑到最近关于现代主义者努力发展有意义的亲密形式和公众参与的学术研究。⁶然而，除了使这些库存图像变得复杂之外，我们还可以考虑它们的粗略轮廓如何引发人们对我们称之为“孤独”的普遍影响的易读性和回避性的疑问。伍尔夫想象中的曼斯菲尔德的假设——同时，一个可以凭借她孤独的位置而被识别的独特身体，以及一个通用的天才轨迹——应该提醒我们，孤独是如何与“个人表达与普遍惯例之间的紧张关系”联系在一起的。孤独既是一种对独特性的热情感觉（或声称），一种不妥协的唯一性，也是一种文化编码的“一系列行动和陈述[……]姿势和标志”，可以唤起真正的颤抖的热度，也可以看起来像是不温不火的陈词滥调。⁷在挑出“一者”时，孤独象征着普遍存在的岛屿和“大陆”，曼斯菲尔德矗立在大海中，而“数以百万计的凡人独自生活”在“无岸的水生荒野”中。⁸孤独似乎是我们独自旅行的风景，但它的特点是散漫的地标和别人的脚步。因此，本文不仅追溯了曼斯菲尔德和伍尔夫关于孤独的思想之间的联系，而且还通过更广阔的文化和文学视野追踪了他们的历程。孤独以一种流动的情感网络的形式出现，其特征是表达规范和情感协议，而这些规范和情感协议“不断地被其​​潮起潮落的狂野所破坏”。⁹