Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness, the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.

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.

This selection of Mansfield's best stories includes such masterpieces as Prelude, Bliss, The Man Without a Temperament, and The Garden Party and has a new introduction by Jeffrey Meyers.

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...

The correspondence of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry is a story in its own right, as compelling and poignant as any that Mansfield herself invented. Here, juxtaposed for the first time, are 300 letters exchanged between them during their extraordinary eleven-year relationship. The letters begin in January 1912, a month after their first meeting, when both were relative newcomers to the London literary scene; the last, a letter from Murry, was written four days before Katherine died, in Fontainebleau, in January 1923. The intervening years were ones of both feverish creativity...

Katherine Mansfield was a formidable critic: astute, witty and something more - she had, as Middleton Murry put it, an extraordinary style and critical verve, mastery and 'sureness of touch'. This is the first scholarly edition of her critical writings. A substantial introduction sets the scene for an understanding of Katherine Mansfield's position as a woman writer on the edge of, but never completely accepted by, Bloomsbury; responding to the pressures of the First World War, illness and exile, and attempting to reconcile the facts of life with the truths of fiction. Careful annotation...

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield Volume I: 1903-1917

The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partnership through its severest trial. This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it...

"In a German Pension" is a book of 13 outstanding short stories written by Katherine Mansfield after she visited Germany as a young woman.

The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different--if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived?
Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These...