Shortly before her death in 1923 Katherine Mansfield told Alfred Orage that she now believed the role of a writer is to communicate an attitude to the reader: “An artist communicates not his vision of the world, but the attitude which results in his [sic] vision; not his dream, but his dream-state; and as his attitude is passive, negative, or indifferent, so he reinforces in his readers the corresponding state of mind.”
She called her previous attitude “a little mischievous”, calling her ‘slices of life’ “partial” and even “misleading”. According to Orage she said “my attitude … stood in need of a change if it was to become active instead of passive.” She had been a “selective camera without a creative principle”. Her aim was to widen the scope of her camera and to employ it – actively – for a conscious purpose, “that of representing life not only as it appears to a certain attitude, but as it appears to another, a different attitude, a creative attitude.”
Orage, using a Christian symbolism present in her work (as in the poem, To God the Father ) and quite inescapable in 19th century Russian literature, suggests such a change of attitude is a bit like coming down from a cross, “a cross of amused suffering”. K.M. agrees with him, but she is perhaps afraid of censure from Orage, since she asks “Do you think it is very presumptuous of me”.