All roads lead to Rue Mansfield

Jenny Pattrick is this year's winner of the fellowship that gives a New Zealand writer six months in Menton. Photo / Mark Mitchell

"Perhaps all human activity is beautiful in the sunlight," Katherine Mansfield wrote in 1920 from her haven on the Cote d'Azur.

"I've just been for a walk on my small boulevard and looking down below at the houses all bright in the sun and housewives washing their linen in great tubs of glittering water and flinging it over the orange trees to dry ... these women lifting their arms, turning to the sun to shake out the wet clothes, were supremely beautiful."

Stricken with tuberculosis, Mansfield had fled dank London for the resort of Menton, on France's farthest southeast coast, where she rented a house, the Villa Isola Bella, for the winter. She moved to Switzerland in May 1921 in the next step of a desperate quest for a cure.

Just 19 months later, she would be dead, aged 34, after undergoing "revolutionary" X-ray treatment at the hands of a Russian charlatan.

Yet, boosted by the sun, the warm Mediterranean breeze and cosy villa ("the first real home of my own I've ever loved"), she found Menton an exceptionally happy and creative period.

Mansfield wrote a series of short stories there, including The Daughters of the Late Colonel, that are considered among her finest. Menton named a street, the Rue Katherine Mansfield, in her honour.

This haunting episode in a brief and turbulent life is being given a special focus from Monday with a week-long Mansfield Festival, featuring exhibitions, seminars, readings and theatre presentations of her work and a public tour of the celebrated villa itself.

Staging this big event in such an out-of-the-way place is an unusual tactic by the promoters of New Zealand culture in France.

Menton is the geographical - if not the climatic - equivalent in France of Invercargill. Close to the Italian border and with a big population of pensioners, the town never features on the literary radar screen in the distant capital. The gamble, though, is that Mansfield's fame, widely acknowledged in France, will deliver Kiwi visibility beyond the confines of Paris.

"While these events are one-offs, the beauty is that they generate interest in New Zealand society and culture in France and they can spark activity in other areas," says New Zealand's Ambassador to France, Sarah Dennis.

And, says New Zealand writer Jenny Pattrick: "You never know what will happen when you give something a push."

Pattrick is this year's holder of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, a $100,000 award, now 40 years old, that enables a New Zealand writer to work at the Villa Isola Bella for six months.

"All over Menton during this cultural week, small, unexpected links will be made, when New Zealand food is tasted, wine drunk, stories read," says Pattrick. "I guess it's not something you can possibly hope to measure."

Seeking a sideways entrance into French consciousness is a smart move, says Francine Tolron, a specialist in New Zealand literature at the University of Avignon.

She praises writers such as Maurice Gee and Alan Duff as exceptional, but says they and other New Zealand authors found it very hard to break directly into the French market.

"I have tried consistently to find French publishers for New Zealand novels, which I have volunteered to translate, but I found they [the publishers] were sort of cautious.

"It is a very special literature, and we don't necessarily understand what it is all about. I translated The Whale Rider but it was nearly impossible to find a publisher in France. It was ... too special, too specific maybe."

The cultural week provides the chance of "an awakening, opening people's eyes that next to them there is much lively literature and culture, thriving right under their noses".