One could not wish anyone greater happiness than that’. 1 But if Gerhardi was young — in his late twenties — the seasoned older writer he corresponded with was only thirty-three, and just over a year later, in January 1923, she was dead.

‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is now known critically as one of Mansfield’s ‘mature’ works. It’s strange (and ‘strange’ is a word that Mansfield herself used a lot, and one that’s useful to bear in mind when it comes to her fiction) to have to use the word ‘mature’ about stories written by a woman so very young. It’s also nothing short of astounding that so many of her best and strongest stories were written in the years when she was incredibly ill, getting weaker by the day. A glance at some of these pieces shows you she knew exactly what it was like, at the beginning of her thirties, to feel old, like ‘a little withered ancient man climbing up endless flights of stairs’ (‘An Ideal Family’). The experience went straight into her fiction in a way that lacks self-indulgence. She records in her notebook, in 1922, the symptoms of lumbago she is suffering. ‘So sudden, so painful. I must remember it when I write about an old man’. 2

She was dead only fifteen years after she’d first decided to become a writer at the age of eighteen (and settled on ‘Mansfield’, her maternal grandmother’s surname and her own middle name, as the name she would pretty steadily use for her writer self). She died so young. She lived so fast. Virginia Woolf, with whom she shared an intense, often thorny and rivalrous, but mutually fascinated and admiring friendship, visited her regularly when she was ill in London in 1918, and was both attracted to and repelled by what she saw as Mansfield’s rather-too-fastness, what we might call her already extensive ‘experience’ (‘she seems to have gone every sort of hog since she was 17’), as Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell in June 1917. Mansfield attracted Woolf, too, with her profound regard for their shared art, their shared ‘job’. Woolf describes her often via imagery of stone and ‘rock’, which stands sometimes for an attractive kind of truth, sometimes a less attractive kind of harshness. She always saw the double tension in Mansfield; here for instance a physically visible tension, when Woolf records after one particular visit how, even though Mansfield was clearly very ill, ‘husky & feeble, crawling about the room like an old woman,’ there was something childlike about her ‘which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. 3

What did Katherine Mansfield achieve in this ‘short-winded’ life (as her great biographer, Claire Tomalin, describes it)? A brief glance at literary modernism and its aftermath reveals just some of the force of both her presence and her importance. She inadvertently brought the influence of Chekhov to English modernism. She dunted Virginia Woolf, with a good sharp elbow, a good sharp review of her 1919 novel Night and Day, and that good sharp friendship, into the kind of experimental writing for which Woolf is properly revered. She unknowingly presented her friend D. H. Lawrence with one of the more sapphic narrative episodes of The Rainbow by telling him stories of her youth, and was later, again inadvertently, his model for the character of Gudrun in Women in Love. She had vision beyond her own prideful ego, the kind of far-sightedness which meant that once on a visit to Woolf, who had given her some of Joyce’s Ulysses to read, she made fun of it, probably because she knew Woolf would enjoy this, then stopped, looked again: ‘but there’s something in this,’ she said. 4

Her stories are the opposite of inadvertent. She wrote nearly a hundred, the strongest of which challenged and altered much in the nature and form of literary fiction of the modernist period and beyond. Phrases, rhythms and tones in her work anticipate writers as different as T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She and her fiction run throughout Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal feminist work The Second Sex like an undercurrent musical theme.