All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything

All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched, and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work. Claire Harman's book explores ten pivotal works, showing how Mansfield's desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 11 January 2024
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

All Sorts of Lives is a captivating, meticulously researched, and utterly fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work. A.L. KENNEDY, a restless outsider, a master of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield's career was short-lived but awe-inspiring. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of, yet by the 1950s, she had been so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was compelled to ask, "Where is she—our missing contemporary?" In this innovative and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield's life and achievements through the form she did so much to revolutionize: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we witness how Mansfield's desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into uncharted territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: "Would you not like to try all sorts of lives—one is so very small." "What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure, sickness, sex, and celebrity... Brilliant Sunday Times" "A searching, incisive, and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read, connect, and understand." Sunjeev Sahota

Weight: 263g
Dimension: 198 x 129 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529918342