One of the Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2025 atThe Guardian
A revealing look at the life and writing of the great modernist.
This biography explores the life and work of Katherine Mansfield, one of literary modernisms most significant writers. On the fringes of Bloomsbury, and friends with D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, and many others, Mansfield was at the heart of literary London at its most experimental. By the time of her death in 1923, aged just thirty-four, she had broken boundaries and created new ways of writing that led her literary sparring partner Virginia Woolf to later admit that Mansfields was the only writing I was ever jealous of. Based on compelling new research, Gerri Kimber challenges previous conceptions surrounding the authors life, uncovers friendships and relationships formerly barely acknowledged, and offers innovative readings of Mansfields most celebrated stories.
Gerri Kimberis visiting professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton. She was president of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years (2010–20) and has published extensively on Mansfield’s life and work.
A sensitive and scholarly account of the fiercely independent life of the modernist writer whose talent was the envy of Virginia Woolf.
Mansfield emerges from this book as a tortured, gifted, and spirited woman who was restless to the core, rarely able to spend any length of time in one place or with one person. The only constant was her overriding desire to write. . . . An important and absorbing book.
"As Kimber writes in her fascinating new biography, Mansfield possessed ‘a supreme gift for storytelling that has never been equalled.’ . . . Kimber is an authority on Mansfield’s life and work."
Kimber, whose prodigious scholarship (often in collaboration with others) has given l3.
![Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life [Hardcover]](http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1836391625.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg "Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life [Hardcover]")