Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Symons, Gabriele D’Annunzio and The Virgins of the Rocks

The association of Katherine Mansfield with Arthur Symons and Gabriele D'Annunzio is examined. Mansfield's interest in the aesthetes and the decadents has long been acknowledged as formative on her intellectual development during the period 1907-09. Her reading notes show her engagement with figures such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and Oscar Wilde. Mansfield was particularly influenced in her approach to many of these authors by her reading of Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature and Studies in Prose and Verse and it was perhaps through Symons that she first came to know of the Italian decadent author, Gabriele D'Annunzio. Mansfield's interest in D'Annunzio is attested to in a letter she wrote to Vera Beauchamp, dating from Spring 1908. Nevertheless, her knowledge of D'Annunzio seems to have been somewhat more detailed than has hitherto been recognized.