There is a strain of Mansfieldian commentary that still rather enjoys dancing on his grave, quite missing the telling fact that Mansfield loved him more than any other man, and meant it when she once told him “we are grown into each other like the wings of one bird”. More than half of her marvellous correspondence, already considered by many as placing her among the great letter writers, was written to Murry. He obsessed her thinking for ten years. And although it has become something of a knee-jerk response to judge him harshly for cracking her up as more sentimental, more saintly, than she ever was, it is only because of his diligence and care for her papers that we know as much of her as we do. Whether we like it or not, Katherine Mansfield chose to be Mrs Murry.

The Mansfield story of illness, early death, such limited time, is a grim one. It is also surprisingly exhilarating. She was dying, slowly and painfully, from her mid-twenties. For much of the time she was confused, lonely, depressed, battling a dark fury at what circumstances dealt her. But she was tough and witty and resilient, and refused to be intimidated by the fact that, as she said with a nod towards Chekov, “for me they already are chopping down the cherry trees”. Writing mattered to her until nothing else was anywhere near as important. And she was severe in how she judged herself. She knew her limitations, and spelled them out. Even after finishing such stories as “Prelude” or “At the Bay”, she took herself to task for not doing them better. Only with “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” did she come close to satisfying her own standards. Although even here she felt she was misunderstood by so admirable a reader as Thomas Hardy. He had written to congratulate her on what he thought a masterly story, but told her how he wanted to know more about those shy awkward sisters. How he missed the point, Mansfield thought. As if there was anything more to be said of them! For that is what a short story was. It was not, as was often supposed, a vivid glimpse of something larger. It was something totally complete in itself. There was nothing more to be said that needed to be said. Her stories were composed as deliberately as a poem. Their conciseness, their inevitability, their completeness, was what she worked towards. As she had once told Murry, when as the editor of a journal he asked her to trim a story back to fit the space he had, “You know how I choose my words; they can’t be changed. And if you don’t like it or think it wrong just as it is, I’d rather you didn’t print it.”

II

Although, year by year, Mansfield’s life reads as a constant challenge, an emotional and financial roller-coaster, the arc of her writing from her first story — as a nine-year-old girl in Wellington, but imagining herself in England — to the last — written in Switzerland a few months before her death, and set in the same street she lived in when she had penned her first — has an expansive, questing vibrancy. Her earliest stories, not surprisingly, were an imitative tribute to what any bright girl of her time might have been reading in her teens: accounts of English middle-class families and their timid adventures, the wealth of fairy stories then in vogue, the sudden revelation of reading Oscar Wilde, with his seductive agenda of paradox, defiance, the spell of art, the glamour of transgression. Mansfield filled notebook after notebook with her imitations, with a schoolgirl’s eager response to living in London, and with hints of her own country, her own city, increasingly nudging in.

“The Tiredness of Rosabel”, written during her return to Wellington from Queen’s College, is the first of her stories to take up what became a compulsive theme: the young woman who faces a grim or hostile world. Her femmes seules, as they are sometimes called, will appear in some of her finest stories, from the pretty but impoverished shop assistant who catches glimpses of romance as she attends the pampered rich, to the ageing and lonely Miss Brill, whose bid for colour in her life is at last packed away with her fox fur, “its little cry” being her own as well. You might even argue that such stories are politics conducted by other means, Mansfield’s confronting poverty and gender inequality with fiction rather than placards, with an intense identifying with what the poor and solitary endure, with such figures as the skivvy in “The Life of Ma Parker”, where silent grief is all life means. There is that other kind of exploitation, too, the predatory sexual advance that is part of being poor.