ABOUT
THE BOOK

Spanning three years in the life of the writer Katherine Mansfield during the First World War, this novel follows the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to break through as a writer. As her brother and lovers are drawn into the conflict, Mansfield becomes more and more determined to write the ‘new kind of fiction’ which she feels the times demand.

While sticking scrupulously to what is known about Mansfield’s life and her friends (a cast that includes D.H and Frieda Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf), this extraordinary novel takes the reader beyond biography into the mind and emotions of its subject. It is a sharp, subtle and appealing portrait of the person of whose work Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘it was the only writing I was ever jealous of.’