Katherine Mansfield - by Gerri Kimber (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

One of the Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2025 at The 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 modernism's 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 Mansfield's "was the only writing I was ever jealous of." Based on compelling new research, Gerri Kimber challenges previous conceptions surrounding the author's life, uncovers friendships and relationships formerly barely acknowledged, and offers innovative readings of Mansfield's most celebrated stories.

Review Quotes

"A sensitive and scholarly account of the fiercely independent life of the modernist writer whose talent was the envy of Virginia Woolf."

-- "The Guardian, "Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2025""

"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."-- "The Spectator"

"With some new material shedding light on Mansfield's key personal relationships and a fine appreciation of her literary technique, this is an essential contribution to Mansfield scholarship, not to mention a fascinating read for general audiences."-- "Library Journal"

"You will find [the Mansfield story] here in its brilliant light and terrible shadow, its weird Kiwi mix of the banal and the marvellous."-- "New Zealand Listener"

"What we often think of as experimental fiction, usually considered as part of Modernism at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, would not have happened without Katherine Mansfield. . . . Kimber embeds her readings of Mansfield's stories within a fairly traditional biography, but she is keen to emphasise originality and innovation."-- "International Times"

"Kimber's much-anticipated biography is one of those once-in-a-decade books that promises to shift by significant degrees our understanding of this leading modernist's short but intensely lived creative life. Mansfield steps from the pages of Kimber's carefully researched account in a fresh combination of roles. A Hidden Life also gives us a Mansfield who was not only an innovator of the modernist short story, but also a pioneer in the now boom genre of fictionalized life-writing."--Elleke Boehmer, novelist, professor of world literature in English, University of Oxford, and patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society

"With its new findings, Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life transforms our understandings of Mansfield and of modernism. A world expert on Mansfield, Kimber has extensively researched the fascinating entanglements of Mansfield's life to produce a biography like no other."--Maggie Humm, author of "The Bloomsbury Photographs"

"This is a glorious treat for all Katherine Mansfield enthusiasts. It's a painstakingly researched and stylishly told account of Mansfield's tempestuous life, with much new information, and sensitive analysis of her brilliant short stories."--Dame Jacqueline Wilson

About the Author

Gerri Kimber is 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.