ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Katherine Mansfield's notebooks oscillate between placing and misplacing their writer's identity. It illuminates both Mansfield's effort to deal with her British heritage as well as her connection with the shifting, complex New Zealand of her youth. Using examples from Mansfield's letters and notebooks, the chapter explores a New Zealand landscape that emerges through the lens of both the coloniser and the colonial, with Mansfield as an author who has been positioned on the margin by her contemporaries and her own estimate. It examines the connection between the representation of landscape and the narration of self, giving an idea of how a blurring of spatial transitions might influence the formation of a person's identity. In Mansfield's notebooks, the process of 'placing' the self creates a distinctive dynamic between pull and rejection, absorption and detachment. In its search for self-knowledge, Mansfield's Urewera diary traverses a country of liminal landscapes.
