A frivolous, wealthy family's garden party continues uninterrupted by the death of a working-class neighbor.

Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies at her heels. Dying at the age of only 34, she became posthumously one of the most influential writers of the last century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings her nearer than we have ever been to this haunted and haunting writer.

In 2009, Kirsty Gunn returned to spend the winter in her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, also the place where Katherine Mansfield grew up. In this exquisitely written “notebook,” which blends memoir, biography, and essay, Gunn records that winter-long experience and the unparalleled insight it allowed her into Mansfield’s fiction. Gunn explores the idea of home and belonging—and of the profound influence of Mansfield’s work on her own creative journey. She asks whether it is even possible to “come home”—and who are we when we get there?

This collection allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years.

'Journal of Katherine Mansfield' is one of the great classics of 20th century literature. Compiled by her husband John Middleton Murry soon after she died and published in 1927, it consists of fragments of diary entries, unposted letters, and scraps of writing.

Addresses postfeminist media culture's emphasis on socioeconomic privilege

'At the Bay' is a short story by Katherine Mansfield. In the following chapters, we discover that when Stanley Burnell goes for a swim early in the morning, Jonathan Trout is there; the two men wanted to be the first in the water, and Jonathan expresses sympathy for Stanley. And out in the countryside, Kezia helps Lottie with the stile to Isabel's disapproval. The Samuel Josephs children are said to be rowdy and they don't play with them any more. Then they come upon Rags and Pip, and the latter shows them an "emerald" he has found in the sand.