Our Perfume can elicit strong reactions from others!
Virginia Woolf’s reaction to Katherine Mansfield ‘s French perfume must count as one of the most acerbic and psychologically revealing.
The perfume in question may have been Guerlain’s famous Jicky scent which would have originally enjoyed an animalic ‘civet’ note before its several reformulations.
Perhaps Woolf’s difficulty with physical intimacy rendered her uncomfortably aware of Mansfield’s very potent sexual presence, a presence no doubt intensified by this ‘skanky’ civet note!
“The dinner last night went off; the delicate things were discussed. We both [she and husband Leonard] could wish that ones [sic] first impression of K.M.was not that she stinks like a ____well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth, I’m a little shocked at her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship….We discussed Henry James, and K.M. was illuminating I thought. ”—Virginia Woolf,The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915-1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (1977)
What do you give a ghost for breakfast?
She’d always arrive with damp hair begging for the top of the milk.
Slight Kiwi accent too. How weird after all these years. Nice smile though. Cute if you like that sort of thing.
That scent.
No air kisses though.
Call me Kezia.
(Kezia was KM’s nick name and appeared as heroine of her three New Zealand stories: Prelude, At the Bay and The Doll’s House) .
Quite strange to wear Jicky and reread Mansfield’s story The Garden Party story today!
Very different ways of evoking the past perhaps and a sense of a favourite writer?
Does it smell like ‘Civet’??? What s snob Virginia is and utterly repressed. Love to have a sniff of this perfume. Don’t you just love Katherine Mansfield.