She died at thirty-four and illness was destroying her steadily throughout most of her adult life, first undiagnosed and untreated gonorrhea and then tuberculosis. She herself was heartily dissatisfied with her own achievement at the end, and even her warmest admirers have to make what they can of the small quantity of first-rate Mansfield. It would be absurd to try to disconnect the life and the work. Yet it has continued among readers, surviving both the ill-judged attempts of her husband Middleton Murry to sanctify her for literature and the condescension of critics who never knew her but dislike her legend-Frank O’Connor’s phrase about “the brassy little shopgirl of literature,” for example. Wyndham Lewis, quoted by Antony Alpers, referred to “the famous New Zealand Mag-story writer” having been “advertised and pushed cynically.” The implication is that her success was due to nonliterary causes, her personality, her attractiveness, her connections, etc. Whether, when she was living, her power to fascinate stood her in good stead is a reasonable question to ask. The fascination continues this is the second major biography Katherine Mansfield has received in two years * (and I must declare an interest: I have one in hand). Not many took a position between these two attitudes, although some alternated, bewildered and fascinated. She was disliked, both as a person and as a writer she was also revered as both.

Yet this was not for want of struggle-to make something new and perfect, to overcome disease, to keep her balance as a person and a writer in an awkward age and within a group of other gifted and difficult people. If she had genius, she lacked stamina, the sticking and staying power genius needs if it is to do more than flash erratically. She was described as both pale and dark: first too fat and then too thin elegant and not quite elegant. It was said, by Leonard Woolf and others, that her face was like a mask. Her image too can be turned about it changes, now vulnerable and wounded, now imperious and exacting, now the wild, ambitious colonial girl, now the simple seeker after purity and truth in art and life. Not that Mansfield was her true name it was one of several she made up.

Nearly sixty years after her death, the name Katherine Mansfield still projects a sharp, strong presence.

Claire tomalin pepys