Margaret Scott (New Zealand author)

Margaret Allan Scott (née Bennett; 27 January 1928 – 4 December 2014) was a New Zealand writer, editor and librarian. She was a friend of many literary New Zealanders, including Charles Brasch and Denis Glover, and was known for transcribing and editing the notebooks of Katherine Mansfield.[1][2] She was the second recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 1971.

Margaret Scott
BornMargaret Allan Bennett
(1928-01-27)27 January 1928
Te Aroha, New Zealand
Died4 December 2014(2014-12-04) (aged 86)
Dunedin, New Zealand
Occupation
  • Writer
  • Editor
  • Librarian
EducationBA, Victoria University of Wellington
Subject
Notable awardsKatherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship
1971
Years active1967–2010
Spouse
Harry Scott
​
​
(m. 1950; died 1960)​
Children3
 Literature portal

Early life and career

Scott was born in Te Aroha and grew up in Christchurch. She attended Christchurch Girls' High School and graduated from the University of Canterbury with a BA in English.[3]

Scott worked in Christchurch as a vocational guidance counsellor before her marriage to Harry Scott (university don, writer and mountaineer) in 1950. It was through her husband that Scott met Charles Brasch in 1949.[3] Scott and her husband spent the first half of their married life in Canada, where he did post-doctoral work, but returned to New Zealand in 1957, where he was appointed head of the new psychology department at the University of Auckland. He was killed in a climbing accident on Aoraki / Mt Cook in 1960. Scott was at that time pregnant with their third child, and left desolate by his death.[3][4] His body was never recovered.[5] In 1961, she wrote an article titled "Widowhood, the Challenge" under the pseudonym Marion Palmer, published in the New Zealand Family Doctor.[6]

After her husband's death, in 1966, Scott moved to Wellington to train as a librarian.[3] Charles Brasch was one of her supporting references, and during her studies she and her children stayed at the house of another New Zealand literary icon, James K. Baxter, while he was living in Dunedin for the Robert Burns Fellowship.[7] Her first appointment was as the first Manuscripts Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library. She held the position from 1967–1973.[3][7]

Literary career

Scott had been interested in the writings of Katherine Mansfield since her final year of high school, when her teacher had read the class one of Mansfield's short stories, The Doll's House.[8] In her 2001 memoir, Recollecting Mansfield, Scott described being offered a job at the Turnbull Library as "an extraordinary gift ... And then to discover that I now had responsibility for the care of masses of Mansfield manuscripts, many of which were nearly illegible and some of which had never been read since they were written, took my breath away".[7]

Scott was one of the few people able to read Mansfield's famously illegible writing.[3] While working at the Turnbull Library, she embarked on a project to transcribe and edit Mansfield's letters and journals. Dan Davin, the Academic Editor at the Oxford University Press, had been seeking a New Zealand writer (preferably female) to take on this project, and Scott had been recommended by her friend Eric McCormick, another New Zealand writer.[7]

Towards the end of 1970, Scott heard about a new fellowship being advertised, to enable a New Zealand writer to go to Menton, France and to work in a room in the Villa Isola Bella where Mansfield herself had stayed and worked.[9] Scott applied for the fellowship and was the second recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, now one of New Zealand's foremost literary awards.[10] She took the opportunity to travel around Europe with her friend, the poet Lauris Edmond, at this time.[4] In 1979 she was awarded a NZ$7000 writers' bursary from Alex Harvey Industries.[11]

Her work on the transcription of Mansfield's letters, together with her co-editor Vincent O'Sullivan, led to the publication of a five-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield by the Oxford University Press. The extensive nature of the work meant that it took over two decades, with the five volumes published between 1984 and 2008.[12][13] In 1985, Perry Meisel reviewed the first volume for the New York Times, writing: "The self-portrait [of Mansfield] that emerges in the first of four projected volumes of her Collected Letters is, not surprisingly, a luminous and affecting one."[14]

In 1989 she received the New Zealand National Library Research Fellowship, to transcribe, annotate and Katherine Mansfield's notebooks. In her 2001 memoir, Scott described this work as being similar to "solving a highly cryptic crossword puzzle". Mansfield's handwriting was not only "idiosyncratic and mercurial, it was also hurried and rough", and other transcribers such as her widower John Middleton Murry had made mistakes that had lost the significance of what Mansfield had written.[12] Furthermore, Murry's selective approach to Mansfield's notebooks had meant that many of them had not been published and were inaccessible.[15]

The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks were published firstly in two volumes by Lincoln University Press in 1997,[16] and subsequently in a single complete edition by the University of Minnesota Press in 2002.[17] Critical reaction was positive: the New York Times described her work as "meticulously compiled",[18] while Lorna Sage writing in the London Review of Books commented that Scott's "long toil involved in deciphering [Mansfield's] unreliable handwriting and arcane order must suggest a labour of love".[19] The Times Literary Supplement wrote: "It is only now, with the publication of Margaret Scott’s complete and unselective transcription of the material bequeathed to Murry, that we can really see Mansfield, off her guard and unexpurgated, for the first time. ... Mansfield's notebooks are remarkable, touched by a sense of the underlying pathos of things, two parts tragedy and two parts comedy."[17]

Later years and death

In 2001, Scott published her memoir, Recollecting Mansfield.[20] Anna Jackson, reviewing the book for the Waikato Times, called it a "beautifully written account", and said "by the time you finish reading her memoir it is clear that you would have wanted to read the story of her life whatever direction it had taken, whether it had included Mansfield or not".[21] The Southland Times called it "an exquisite book which introduces another aspect of a talented female New Zealand writer, Margaret Scott, who gives unexpected insights into the life and talent of Katherine Mansfield". The reviewer praised Scott, highlighting: "Her determination, talent and enthusiasm; the struggle she had as a sole parent; the many ways she coped with the financial hardship and the loneliness of life after her husband's untimely death; and her ability to make and keep wonderful and supportive friends".[22]

Scott was lifelong friends with writer Charles Brasch, and they had a brief intimate relationship after the death of her husband. Brasch wrote one of his best-known poems, Winter Anenomes, after Scott presented him with some flowers shortly before he died.[23][24][25] In 2007, Scott edited and wrote the introduction to Charles Brasch in Egypt, being Brasch's account of his time in Egypt.[26]

After Brasch's death in 1973, his journals were deposited in the Hocken Library with a thirty-year embargo on publication. In 2003, the journals became available to view, and Scott began transcribing and editing the journals for publication. She became ill before she could complete the task, but had finished transcribing all his journals. The editing was completed by Peter Simpson and the journals were published in a three volume series between 2013 and 2018.[27][28]

Scott died on 4 December 2014.[3][29] After her death, New Zealand writer C. K. Stead (who received the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship the year after Scott, in 1972) wrote: "... I was always aware of, and often in touch with, Margaret as a major figure in the field, someone whose intelligence I admired, and whom I thought of always as one who could be 'temperamental', but generous, sensitive, herself a stylist of refinement, an entirely appropriate person to be dealing with [Mansfield]."[30]

Selected works
  • The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (5 volumes, 1984–2008), co-editor with Vincent O'Sullivan
  • The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (1997), editor
  • Recollecting Mansfield (2001), author
  • Charles Brasch in Egypt (2007), editor

References
  1. "Scott, Margaret Allan, 1928–2014: Papers". National Library of New Zealand. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  2. "Interview with Margaret Scott". National Library of New Zealand. 7 July 1995. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  3. Crean, Mike (24 January 2015). "Dedicated scholarship fleshed out NZ literary great's life story". The Dominion Post. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  4. Crean, Mike (17 January 2015). "Acclaimed for shedding light on Mansfield's life". The Press. p. C10.
  5. Herkt, David (26 May 2018). "An open diary: The secret loves of wealthy Kiwi art patron Charles Orwell Brasch". Stuff.co.nz. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  6. "Widowhood, the challenge – Article by Margaret Scott". National Library of New Zealand. Retrieved 17 January 2021.
  7. Scott, Margaret (2001). "Chapter Three". Recollecting Mansfield. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8696-2076-9. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  8. Scott, Margaret (2001). "Chapter Two". Recollecting Mansfield. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8696-2076-9. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  9. Scott, Margaret (2001). "Chapter Five". Recollecting Mansfield. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8696-2076-9. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  10. "Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship". Arts Foundation. Retrieved 25 September 2020.
  11. "Focus - Writer's Award". Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision. Retrieved 17 January 2021.
  12. Scott, Margaret (2001). "Chapter Twenty". Recollecting Mansfield. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8696-2076-9. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  13. "Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  14. Meisel, Perry (20 January 1985). "A Long Way from New Zealand". New York Times. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  15. Salas, Gerardo Rodríguez (December 2014). "Revisiting Katherine Mansfield: An Interview with Margaret Scott (2002)" (PDF). Newsletter of the Katherine Mansfield Society (19). Katherine Mansfield Society. p. 17. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  16. Mansfield, Katherine (1997). Scott, Margaret (ed.). The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Volumes 1 and 2. Lincoln University Press. ISBN 978-0-9088-9649-3. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  17. Mansfield, Katherine (2002). Scott, Margaret (ed.). The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-4236-6.
  18. Hampl, Patricia (16 March 2003). "Whistling in the Dark". New York Times. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  19. Sage, Lorna (18 June 1998). "I, too, write a little". London Review of Books. 20 (12). Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  20. Scott, Margaret (2001). Recollecting Mansfield. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8696-2076-9. Retrieved 20 October 2020.
  21. Jackson, Anna (28 April 2001). "Story behind the story of Mansfield diaries". Waikato Times. p. 16.
  22. Campbell, Louise (5 May 2001). "Insights into Mansfield". Southland Times. p. 26.
  23. Benson, Nigel (14 March 2009). "Charles Brasch: a man alone". Otago Daily Times. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  24. "Legacy, Harmonizing my starting place: Charles Brasch". Otago University. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  25. Scott, Margaret (2001). "Chapter Seventeen". Recollecting Mansfield. Random House. ISBN 978-1-8696-2076-9. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  26. Brasch, Charles (2007). Scott, Margaret (ed.). Charles Brasch in Egypt. Wellington, New Zealand: Steele Roberts. ISBN 978-1-8774-4806-5. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  27. Gilchrist, Shane (19 June 2017). "Dearest diaries". Otago Daily Times. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  28. Brasch, Charles (2018). Simpson, Peter (ed.). Charles Brasch Journals 1958–1973. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press. ISBN 978-1-9885-3114-4. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  29. "Margaret Allan SCOTT - Death Notice". New Zealand Herald. 9 December 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
  30. Stead, C.K. (December 2014). "Margaret Scott, 1928–2014" (PDF). Newsletter of the Katherine Mansfield Society (19). Katherine Mansfield Society. p. 15. Retrieved 22 October 2020.
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