Arabian Days : Katherine Mansfield’s Islamic Imaginary

Maqbool, Sameeya and Schad, John and Dickinson, Philip (2026) Arabian Days : Katherine Mansfield’s Islamic Imaginary. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

My research, adopting a post-critical approach, explores traces of Islam in Katherine Mansfield's life-writing, poetry, and fiction, focusing on themes of marriage, travel, illness, and re-invention. Central to the thesis is an exploration of Mansfield's life in parallel with Abdullah Quilliam (1856 – 1932), an English Muslim convert and founder of England’s first mosque in 1891. The opening chapter, set in 1910, focuses on Mansfield’s poem ‘The Arabian Shawl’ and a photograph, taken in Rottingdean in 1910, of her wearing such a shawl. This chapter examines the complex personal circumstances surrounding this period in Mansfield’s life, including her relationship with Garnet Trowell, and her consequent pregnancy which led to miscarriage but not marriage. Mansfield was, therefore, a kind of un-wife or ghost wife, and in that respect, is, in my work, mirrored by the figure of Edith Miriam Spray (1870 – 1956), who was the third or possibly fourth wife of Quilliam by Islamic marriage – their marriage, only being Islamic, was, of course, invalid in English law. Chapter two, set in 1915, focuses primarily on a photograph taken in that year of Miriam and Quilliam in Bloomsbury. It features Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ (1922), a text that, as Cristina Arufe Moares (2019) argues, is remarkably rich in post-colonial motifs. There is also an appearance from a figure called Mrs. Woolf, a version of Virginia Woolf, who was, at the time, living in Hogarth House, Richmond, curing from her most violent breakdown to date, and thinking of Bloomsbury. This chapter highlights a parallel: Mansfield, intellectually close to but never part of the Bloomsbury Group, and Quilliam and Miriam, Muslims living only a short walk from Woolf’s family home, physically near yet equally outside that circle. The third chapter, set in both 1918 and 1908, focuses on travel, imagining Mansfield and Quilliam on separate train journeys – Mansfield heading to France in 1918 to visit her brother’s grave, and Quilliam, a decade earlier, journeying to Constantinople to be received by the Sultan. This chapter draws on Mansfield’s adoption of pseudonyms and Quilliam’s conversion to Islam, exploring how travel and the reinvention of the self, parallel an underlying engagement with Islam. Finally, the fourth chapter, set between late 1922 and early 1923, works on and around Mansfield’s stay in the Gurdjieff Institute, Paris – the sanatorium in which she was to die. It was, though, also where she directly came across certain kinds of Eastern mysticism through the Institute’s practice of various spiritual exercises and treatments. This leads to a meditation on the role of death in Mansfield and how it may be seen, or imagined, to incorporate a buried orientation towards the Islamic. My research is post-critical, and so this thesis takes novelistic form. Post-criticism or creative-critical writing is a relatively new form of literary scholarship which, although readerly and scholarly, is not driven by argumentation but, instead, deploys various literary devices such as narrative, dialogue, and character. My thesis could be viewed, then, as a quotational novel, where action and plot is generated through and around verbatim quotation, primarily from Mansfield.