Introduction

Katherine Mansfield's notebooks and letters include detailed accounts of her experience with tuberculosis (TB), as well her thoughts on other writers who also had the same disease, including John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Anton Chekhov. This essay examines Mansfield's perception of herself as following in the footsteps of this illustrious group of nineteenth-century writers, and how she sought to explore the link between TB and literary talent, while simultaneously attempting to dispel the Romantic notions about TB and those who were infected with it.

In her book Illness as Metaphor Susan Sontag argues that we should avoid using metaphorical language to describe illness, emphasising that ‘illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking’. Sontag discusses the various ways in which myths and metaphors about TB were culturally constructed and the all-pervasive influence these had on how patients experienced the disease, in many cases dissuading the patient from seeking appropriate treatment. Prior to the discovery by Robert Koch in 1882 of the bacteria which caused TB, it was seen as a ‘mysterious’ disease, and such symptoms as ‘rosy cheeks’ and ‘fever’ contributed to its reputation as a disease of ‘passion’. As Sontag puts it, ‘Fever in TB was a sign of an inward burning: the tubercular is someone “consumed” by ardor, that ardor leading to the dissolution of the body.’ And it was this supposed connection between passion and TB that led many to believe ‘there is generally some passionate feeling which provokes, which expresses itself in, a bout of TB. But the passions must be thwarted, the hopes blighted.’ In this mythologised version of the disease, TB is described as a ‘delicate, sensitive’, and ‘“romantic agony”’.

Taking as an example of the notion that TB only affected those who were highly sensitive and creative, Sontag observes that ‘Shelley consoled Keats that “this consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done”’.