For the little governess, it comes as the seemingly kindly, old, German gentleman, with the marvellous detail of the nerve in his ancient knee ticking against her as he gropes; for the down-at-heel, over-the-hill actress in “Pictures”, it arrives as the blunt, fat man who buys her a drink, at the moment when poverty compels her to change, as one might say, one profession for another.

Not that Mansfield writes anything like insistent “social realism”. She is too stylish for that, taking delight in her narrative deftness, in the details that catch her eye, the vivid freshness of her turns of phrase. She was too independent a writer to join what might be called “a cause”, just as she seems so often drawn towards satire, with her gift for winkling out human weakness. It was a gift that also saved her from the sentimentality to which at times she sailed a little too close. One of the important points of her writing life, in fact, was the realisation when as a twenty-one year old she lived in Bavaria, carefully tucked out of sight by her mother as she waited for the baby she then lost, that the way to deal with something so fracturing as her personal circumstances was not to rage, as she did in one unsuccessful story from that time, but to bring to it a steely satiric eye, to sidestep personal complaint by mocking the world that surrounded it. Her first book, In a German Pension, came at the historical moment when the English and the Germans more than usually cast insults at each other, and Bavaria offered her a satirist’s dream. Her personal bitterness, however, found its voice in details that show sex for the nasty ruse it can be. As a disillusioned married woman considers, after attending a coarse local wedding, and while waiting for her drunken husband to come to bed, “all over the world the same; but, God in heaven — but stupid.”

It was this making fun of the Germans that first brought her name before the public, with the collection she later so disliked. She refused to have the book republished during the First World War, when it would have brought her easy money as anti-German propaganda. Yet it was the War that brought about the most significant change in how Mansfield wrote, the stories that turned her back towards the Wellington years she now accepted as the emotional centre to her life.

Already she had written a small group of stories that explored a very different New Zealand to the one she knew as a businessman’s daughter, and light years, one might say, from clever, privileged sisters and their cultivated families, like her own. They were part of a deliberate career ploy. When she had first met the young John Middleton Murry, he was editing a magazine that deliberately set out to impose modern ideas on Edwardian complacency. His journal Rhythm took as its motto a line from J. M. Synge, the declaration that “Before art can be modern it must learn to be brutal.” Mansfield answered the call with New Zealand back-blocks stories of violence, hysteria, child depravity, raw colonial turmoil. There is nothing else like “The Woman at the Store” or “Millie” or “Ole Underwood” in the rest of her writing. They are stories that see her country with a disturbing, heightened realism that answered that call to brutality, and that she soon put aside as she returned to her social satires, to her isolated women and smart literary coteries.

As her biographies rightly underscore, the great change in Mansfield’s writing followed the death of her younger brother in the early years of the War. Leslie was her favourite among her siblings. Before his being sent to the Front, they had gone over their memories of life together back in Wellington, their childhood in that world of quiet middle-class certainties and now distant charm. Once her brother was dead, those memories flared again on the world’s far other side, as she set out to recover them in what she called “a kind of special prose”. It was the city and the suburbs of her girlhood she was now driven to reveal as she had never yet attempted, a celebration of “that lovely time when we were both alive”. There was an almost religious zeal to this artistic mission, “for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world”. And so she began on what at first she thought of as a novel, but trimmed back to the long short story “Prelude”. It is a luminous memory as well as an immediate evoking of her family as they leave the house where she was born in Thorndon for the remote, enchanted spaces of Karori, where a sense of childhood reality is raised, to quote Frank O’Connor, to something unique. These Wellington stories “set out to do something that had never been done before and to do it in a manner that had never been used before, a manner that had something in common with that of the fairy tale…. These stories are conscious, deliberate acts of magic, as though a writer were to go into a room where his beloved lay dead and try to repeat the miracle of Lazarus.”

There was a new maturity in what Mansfield wrote from then on, an emotional confidence, a finer stylistic poise. But there was her awareness, too, that the clock was ticking down. She made elaborate plans for what she intended to publish, drawing up ideas for stories she did not always write. She shuttled back and forth between London and the South of France, sometimes with Murry, sometimes alone, often with Ida Baker — the devoted friend who was indispensable but infuriated her — and drove herself to write in that narrowing terrain between urgency and desperation. Always tougher on herself than she need be, she was, as she said, “a writer first, a woman second”.