Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives explores how both the literary, cultural, editorial and biographical influence of French arts and philosophy, and life as an emigre in France shaped Mansfield’s evolution as a key modernist writer, while setting her within the geographies and cultural dynamics of Anglo-French modernism.

Mansfield’s many stays in France were decisive in intellectual, personal and psychological terms: discovering ‘Murry’s Paris’ and the Left Bank; escaping to the War Zone to join Francis Carco; living as a civilian in wartime during the bombardments of Paris; travelling and finding lodgings as a single woman in war-ravaged towns; the experience of bereavement and debilitating ill-health abroad; and the joys and pitfalls for an outsider of a foreign land and idiom.