Thieves

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

The impressive life of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), the New
Zealand writer who is credited with revolutionizing the short-story form
in English, was tragically shortened by tuberculosis. Virginia Woolf
acknowledged Mansfield’s writing as the only work that evoked her
jealousy, yet among the literati of the time the novel, not the story,
continued to claim pride of place.

Thieves is a fictionalized account of Mansfield’s life. In the 1980s,
Monty, a disillusioned New Zealand scholar, steals a letter intended for
his writer-father, one that offers new Mansfield material. Curiously,
the letter jolts Monty out of his self-imposed writer’s block. He
heads for Chicago to trace the story of a love affair between the young
Mansfield and Garnet Trowell, a violinist who fathered Mansfield’s
only—but miscarried—child. Monty’s discovery of the passionate
letter written by Mansfield to her young lover shocks him into a new
understanding of his own dangerously unsettled life.

The story moves easily from New Zealand to Europe, on to Chicago and
thence to Windsor, Ontario. It is not only both a love story and a
mystery, but also an exploration of what makes us whole. The novel’s
dedication is no mere sentence, but a two-page eulogy to the real woman
who craved power, wealth, and freedom, and who, at the age of 20,
travelled halfway around the world to escape her disapproving family and
to become a writer.

Thieves is an ambitious and textually complex novel meant to be read
slowly and savoured.