Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life

One of The Guardian’s Best Biographies of 2025.

This biography explores the life and work of Katherine Mansfield, one of literary modernism’s most significant writers. On the fringes of Bloomsbury, and friends with D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot and many others, Mansfield was at the heart of literary London at its most experimental. By the time of her death in 1923, aged just 34, she had broken boundaries and created new ways of writing that led her literary sparring partner Virginia Woolf to later admit that Mansfield’s ‘was the only writing I was ever jealous of’. Based on compelling new research, Gerri Kimber challenges previous conceptions surrounding the author’s life, uncovers friendships and relationships formerly barely acknowledged and offers innovative readings of Mansfield’s most celebrated stories.