The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic works of the group. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships – personal and literary – with such major Modernist figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years · Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism · Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing · Mansfield and modernist culture – from Bloomsbury to the little magazines · Mansfield and her contemporaries – Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim · Mansfield and the arts – visual culture, cinema and music The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

Addresses postfeminist media culture's emphasis on socioeconomic privilege

"[KM was] the only writer I was ever jealous about." -- Virginia WoolfA gorgeous portrait of a complex and passionate author. Mansfield's literary career was on the rise when on her thirtieth birthday her doctors advised her to stop writing, move to a sanatorium, and quietly die of tuberculosis in six months. Unwilling to accept her death sentence, she became a wandering consumptive and traveled from London to Paris, to the Riviera, and up into the Alps in pursuit of a cure.Extracting Mansfield's correspondence and diaries, FitzPatrick captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer-her successes and disappointments-during her heroic battle against the debilitating disease that sapped her energy, derailed her marriage, and fostered a growing dependency on her devoted caregiver."One of the delights of the book, which adds to the poignancy and authenticity of the story as a whole, is the frequent use of direct passages taken from KM. This book will delight all KM devotees, who will relish another chance to live through the extraordinary life of KM-a life which never ceases to fascinate and move . . .. ---Dr. Gerri Kimber, The Katherine Mansfield Society

Katherine Mansfield's arrival in London in 1908 marked the start of her professional career as a writer and this study marks a revival of her reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. The international line-up of contributors attests to Mansfield's global appeal. By discussing her fiction in relation to her life, the contributors to this critical work present reinterpretations and readings. Enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to her diaries and letters, these readings combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class and gender, biography/autobiography. The historical and aesthetic studies of Mansfield's work all take place within a framework of modernist literature, criticism and theory, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be a Modernist while allocating Mansfield a firm place in any current study of Modernism.

An illustrated overview of the women in the Bloomsbury circle (a group who lived in or near London during the first half of the twentieth century that influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality). This work focuses on the Bloomsbury Group's rich and diverse artistic output. The color as well as black-and-white reproductions of paintings, textile designs, photographs and line drawings are dominated by the works of Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington and Duncan Grant.