Kathleen Jones conveys the living presence of Katherine Mansfield in the present tense, so that one feels, along with her all-time words, her continued presence. She conveys the full complexity of Mansfield's character with understanding and without bias - what a feat given how manifold it is. What Middleton Murry made of her has a parallelled fascination; the contrasts of the living reality and the purified legend, an ephemeral construct appropriately narrated in the past tense, were striking. A marvellous, innovative biography. -- Lyndall Gordon, Biographer A compelling narrative of a writer's passion for her work, her growth to maturity and the extraordinary trajectory which took a plump, awkward, rebellious little girl from a rigidly conventional family halfway across the world and into a culture of artistic, social and sexual experimentation. -- Helen Dunmore, novelist I read it with huge enjoyment - I think it's by far the best Katherine Mansfield biography yet - giving a truthful but still sympathetic portrait. -- Jacqueline Wilson, novelist & patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society Jones has brought to the work a scholar's regard for fact, a novelist's regard for form, and a poet's regard for cadence. The test of a good literary biography is whether it makes you want to reacquaint yourself with the author's writing. This biography does just that. -- Sarah Sandley, Honorary Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society Jones ! writes with insight and verve, and an intelligent sympathy as her story is set out against those overlapping literary and social worlds the writer passes through ! A mass of new material unavailable to earlier biographers makes this new telling richly detailed and compelling. -- Vincent O'Sullivan, co-editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield What [emerges] with indisputable clarity from Jones's skilful use of her sources is a portrait of Mansfield, stylish and febrile, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, relishing life, scrutinising it with her keen intelligence, and recording her perceptions in a voice that continues to unsettle and surprise. -- Pamela Norris, Literary Review
