Literary history has tended to relegate New Zealand’s Katherine Mansfield to the fringes of modernism, despite the fact that as an expatriate living in London she lived very much within its maelstrom, moving easily among such heavyweights as D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. This outcome might have been quite different had Mansfield lived longer than a mere 34 years and, consequently, had her literary output been more prodigious. What she did produce elicited the praise and admiration of many of her contemporaries. Virginia Woolf, considered Mansfield’s prime rival, maintained a friendship with her, albeit one often strained by professional envy, Woolf having once famously said, “She is the only writer I have ever been jealous of.” Read more…