Katherine Mansfield NoteBooks: Complete Edition

Katherine Mansfield was a renowned modernist writer who published three collections of short stories during her short life. After her death, her private writings and letters were edited and published in four volumes by her husband, John Middleton Murry. However, these editions were heavily edited and did not accurately portray Mansfield's true self. It wasn't until over four decades later that a complete and unedited version of her private writings, titled The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, was published. These writings offer a comprehensive and honest portrayal of Mansfield as a complex and ambitious woman with a neurotic and sexually voracious nature, a fascination with daily life, and an obsession with death.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) published three collections of short stories -- In a German Pension, Bliss, and The Garden Party -- during her tragically short life, and was acclaimed as one of modernism's most daring and original writers. After her death from tuberculosis in France, Mansfield's private writings and letters were edited by her husband, John Middleton Murry, and published in four volumes between 1927 and 1954. Murry, however, took liberties in recasting his wife's journals and notes. He excluded most of the vast mass of material and revised much of what he included, resulting in a distorted image of Mansfield as a passive, ethereal spirit.More than four decades later, the real Mansfield finally emerges in The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, the first unexpurgated edition of her private writings. Fully and accurately transcribed by editor Margaret Scott, these infrequent diary entries, drafts of letters, introspective notes jotted on scraps of paper, unfinished stories, half-plotted novels, poems, recipes, and shopping lists offer a complete and compelling portrait of a complex woman who was ambitious and at times ruthless, neurotic and sexually voracious, witty and acerbic, fascinated with the minutiae of daily life and obsessed with death.