Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (Vermilion Books) - Softcover

Tomalin, Claire

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312029373 ISBN 13: 9780312029371

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1989

Synopsis

An account of the life of the gifted, beautiful, but strangely secretive writer provides a glimpse of the competitive London literary scene between 1908 and 1923 and of such literary figures as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

About this title

About the Author:

Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the New Statesman then the Sunday Times before leaving to become a full-time writer. Her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and she has since written a number of highly acclaimed and bestselling biographies. They include Jane Austen: A Life, The Invisible Woman, a definitive account of Dickens' relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, which won three major literary awards, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. In the highly acclaimed Charles Dickens: A Life, she presents a full-scale biography of our greatest novelist. She is married to the writer Michael Frayn.

From 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.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0312029373
• ISBN 13: 9780312029371
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292