"For a few years in the 1910s and early 1920s the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield was at the heart of the modern movement in literature. Married to the eminent critic and editor John Middleton Mury, she was friends with leading members of the Bloomsbury and Garsington sets such as Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey. She knew D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and Aldous Huxley. She met James Joyce. Artists such as Mark Gertler, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington crossed her path. This chronology details her tumultuous and tragic life (she died from tuberculosis aged only thirty-four), and sheds new light on her approach and attitudes to writing."--Jacket.

"Taking an innovative approach to criticism, Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form demonstrates how Mansfield's stylistic practice both embodies and conveys her analysis of social and psychological trauma through a "metaphoric" use of literary form. New argues that the stories are neither simple vehicles for conveying emotional states nor neutral representations of moments in time but carefully crafted models, or correlatives, of social and psychological conditions of understanding. He elucidates a number of formal strategies, such as sequence, reversal, negation, repetition, deferral, and reconstruction, and then applies them to a wide range of Mansfield's stories, including such favorites as "Prelude," "The Voyage," "The Little Governess," and "Je ne parle pas francais.""--Jacket.

An account of the life of the gifted, beautiful, but strangely secretive writer provides a glimpse of the competitive London literary scene between 1908 and 1923 and of such literary figures as D.H. Lawrence and VIrginia Woolf.