New essays and creative explorations of the friendship, milieu and writings of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

‘I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend … pray consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing, who desires to be scrupulously truthful - and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.’

Katherine Mansfield’s ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their ‘curious & thrilling’ literary relationship - absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in ‘quicksands’ - and its profound impact on their creative imaginations.