Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Disgust disgusts, and its obscenities rub off on the investigator. Think of the hellfire sermon in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a diatribe that glories in disgust as well as in the jouissance of terrorising schoolboys.

both writers show a queasy, even anorexic attitude to eating, their nausea exacerbated by the sight and sound of other masticating jaws.1

Mansfield’s In a German Pension (1911), which contains some of her most disgusted and disgusting stories, is generally dismissed as juvenilia.