Katherine Mansfield (ePub)

"This book will delight all Katherine Mansfield devotees, who will relish the chance to live through the extraordinary life of KM, a life that never ceases to fascinate and move, no matter how many times it's retold." -Katherine Mansfield Society

Katherine waved to her parents until the ship made a sharp turn out of the Wellington harbor and they disappeared from view. The sudden shift in the ocean current forced her to grip the railing and brace herself against the gale winds. As she plunged toward the open sea, she tossed back her head and shouted, "I'm free!"

Katherine Mansfield is a powerfully understated fictional narrative of an author who was determined to make her way¬-and her mark-in London's early 20th Century literary society. A foreigner from New Zealand, Mansfield was never welcomed into the famed Bloomsbury Group, yet she was respected-even revered-by Virginia Woolf, who admitted Mansfield was the only writer who made her jealous.

Mansfield's prolific literary career was on an upward spiral when on her thirtieth birthday her doctors advise her to stop writing, move to a sanatorium, and die quietly of tuberculosis. Her response to this death toll was to become a wandering consumptive who traveled from London to Paris, to the Riviera, and high into the Alps in pursuit of a cure for her health and her soul, and in pursuit of her next short story.

Informed by the historic record and interspersed with Mansfield's own correspondence and diaries, this historical novel guides us through Mansfield's life-her struggles, successes, and setbacks-and inside the debilitating disease that sapped her energy, derailed her marriage, and fostered her growing dependency on a faithful and obsessive caregiver, LM, a woman whose devotion bred equal parts gratitude and resentment.