All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything

Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield-s career was short but dazzling. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, -Where is she – our missing contemporary?-

In this inventive and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield's life and achievements, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield-s desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small.'