Author Description

"In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of license that English people give themselves - to spread over the flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I wrote with acid'. By focusing on Mansfield's position as a New Zealander, feeling herself to be an outsider in British literary life, this book explores how Mansfield's idiosyncratic Modernist aesthetic developed. When she came in contact with a group of Fauvist artists and writers who were mostly not English, and not part of Bloomsbury, Mansfield began to create her sharp-edged stories, a literary Fauvism in search of the secret self. The book traces Mansfield's artistic and intellectural development, specifically linking her engagement with Post-Impressionism to readings of her most innovative and experimental stories."--BOOK JACKET.