Ill feelings

John Middleton Murry (1888-1957), a famous though not universally loved man of letters in his day, is now remembered mostly for having been the husband of Katherine Mansfield, the New Zealand born short story writer and literary disciple of Chekhov. Their marriage was a difficult one: they got on better when they did not live together and communicated mainly by letter.

Soon after Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis—for which, in desperation, she had sought treatment first from the Russian physicist Manoukhian, who bombarded her spleen with x rays until she was ill from it, and then from Gurdijeff’s mystical Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where she died—Murry married Violet Le Maistre.

Le …