The letters in this volume cover the eighteen months Katherine Mansfield spent in England, France, and Switzerland from May 1920 to the end of 1921. It is the period of her finest stories, and when her life took its most decisive turn. The qualities of her earlier correspondence remain undiminished--the precision and directness, the intelligence and wit, the dark incisiveness and sheer fun. Above all, these letters attest to her considerable courage, against increasingly adverse odds, as she approached the final years of her life.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) published three collections of short stories -- In a German Pension, Bliss, and The Garden Party -- during her tragically short life, and was acclaimed as one of modernism's most daring and original writers. After her death from tuberculosis in France, Mansfield's private writings and letters were edited by her husband, John Middleton Murry, and published in four volumes between 1927 and 1954. Murry, however, took liberties in recasting his wife's journals and notes. He excluded most of the vast mass of material and revised much of what he included, resulting...