SOFFIA IL VENTO

Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888 in New Zealand, in Wellington, on Tinakori Road. In 1893, she moved with her family to Karori, a town three hundred metres from the sea. At the age of fifteen she left to study in England for three years. She subsequently returned to Wellington, and in 1908 moved permanently to London, alone and without her family. She would never return to her island. She lived in Europe throughout her brief life, and wrote short stories through which she introduced her readers to a solitary, magic-filled childhood in a mysterious land, its wild nature woven inextricably into the lives of her characters.

THE WIND BLOWS is a story performed and danced to the minor-key tempo of a piano piece present in the places of memory, of a real past projected into a sudden present.
The tale of elsewhere is the very essence of THE WIND BLOWS, because Katherine Mansfield was born in an elsewhere that she carried within her throughout her entire life, an elsewhere that marked her brief, nomadic existence, her constant search for a home, a place to arrive at. The wild little girl from New Zealand awakens suddenly within a different, European culture; she awakens because the wind, the light, and the life of her distant island have left an indelible imprint on her spirit. Katherine’s mission becomes to write about the time and places of that prodigious era when she was a child, to pay a sacred debt to the country that witnessed her birth and that claimed her back in vain.
Katherine Mansfield falls ill early, and physical pain becomes her fierce companion, marking her movements from one place of care to another, even under the bombardments of the First World War. Yet even as illness grants her no respite, she reads and writes to distant friends in order to heal and to continue telling her stories. Thus the wind of the tale is the wind of one who is pursued by life, deafened by the heartbeat of a present that contains both past and future.