Katherine Mansfield A Literary Life

In a letter, Katherine Mansfield wrote: "I hate the sort of license that English people give themselves--to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I write with acid." This book explores Mansfield's idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fauvist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.