Katherine Mansfield
A Secret Life
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Katherine Mansfield is the celebrated biography be bestselling author Claire Tomalin
'One of the best biographies I have ever read: a perfect match of author and subject. It should become a classic' Alison Lurie
Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies on her heels; but when she died aged only thirty-four she became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings us nearer than we have ever been to this courageous, greatly gifted, haunted and haunting writer.
'Generous, dispassionate, even-handed, setting out probably as plainly as anyone ever will Katherine's high hopes, the odds she faced and the impossible obstacles that ditched her in the end' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph
'Provides the finest and most subtly shaded portrait so far' John Gross, New York Times
From the acclaimed author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, this virtuoso biography is invaluable reading for lovers of Katherine Mansfield everywhere.
Claire Tomalin is the award-winning author of eight highly acclaimed biographies, including: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens; Mrs Jordan's Profession; Jane Austen: A Life; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self; Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man and, most recently, Charles Dickens: A Life. A former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, she is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British biographer Tomalin (Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft) here reinterprets the life and career of the great New Zealand-born short story writer and her relationships with family and friends. Writing from a perspective different from that of previous biographers Antony Alpers and Jeffrey Meyers, and allowed to examine letters not available to them, she is less sympathetic than they to John Middleton Murry and more appreciative of D. H. Lawrence's importance to Mansfield. She adds new dimensions to the pictures of Mansfield's connections with her friend Edith Bendall, her "faithful wife'' Ida Constance Baker and Virginia Woolf. ``None of her sexual relations with men appears to have given her happiness or even satisfaction,'' and, in her affairs with women, she did ``the courting, the letter-writing and the jilting.'' Tomalin also suggests that Mansfield's many illnesses and perhaps her death, in 1923 at age 34, from TB, were attributable to the gonorrhea she contracted from Floryan Sobieniowski in 1909. Photos.
