Katherine Mansfield’s ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry, and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship – absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in ‘quicksands’ – and its profound impact on their creative imaginations. Critical essays include Katherine Mansfield Essay Prizewinner Karina Jakubowicz on Woolf’s Kew Gard ... More

Katherine Mansfield’s ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry, and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship – absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in ‘quicksands’ – and its profound impact on their creative imaginations. Critical essays include Katherine Mansfield Essay Prizewinner Karina Jakubowicz on Woolf’s Kew Gardens, Maud Ellmann on disgust, Maria DiBattista on these artists’ distinctive takes on ‘reality’, Sydney Janet Kaplan on the Conrad Aiken connection, and Christine Froula on Mansfield’s secrets. Creative artists include Vanessa Bell in painterly dialogue with her sister’s classic manifesto A Room of One’s Own, the celebrated novelist Ali Smith -- ‘Scotland’s Nobel-laureate-in-waiting’, says Irish playwright Sebastian Barry – whose ‘Getting Virginia Woolf’s Goat’ leads the creative section, ['and' deleted] Barbara Egel’s dramatic adaptation of Woolf’s story ‘Moments of Being: "Slater’s Pins Have No Points"’ and [deleted:original; add:] new poems by Jackie Jones and Maggie Rainey-Smith.