Claire Harman

Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield’s short but dazzling career was characterised by struggle, insecurity and sacrifice – alongside a glorious, relentless creative drive and openness. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, ‘where is she – our missing contemporary?’

Award-winning writer and critic Claire Harman suggests Mansfield was vital to the Modernist movement and is strikingly relevant today, helping us to see differently, to savour and to notice things.