The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield

Born in New Zealand in 1888, Katherine Mansfield left Wellington when she was 19 to begin a career as a writer in London. In the years that followed, she received critical acclaim and counted among her friends T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. Since her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1923, her writings have drawn increasingly varied critical attention. Through a collection of essays and reviews, this volume traces the critical response to Mansfield’s writings. It includes the earliest reviews of her work in 1911 through the most recent examinations of her fiction. Though the pieces included are written in English, some essays discuss her links with Europe and with French, German and Asian critics. An introductory essay and chronology briefly overview the critical reception of her work, and a selected bibliography lists bibliographical, biographical and critical studies.