ALL SORTS OF LIVES: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything, by Claire Harman (Chatto & Windus, $37)
This is a vividly written, enthusiastic account of Katherine Mansfield’s life and work, taking, chronologically, 10 of her short stories and her life around the time each was written.
It analyses well what it was that made her fiction “modernist”, how fresh and, above all, original it was in its time, and how much a writer like Virginia Woolf owed to it. In addition to Woolf, it puts Mansfield into the company, and the literary context, of her other major contemporaries: TS