Ida Constance Baker

Ida Constance Baker, often known by her pseudonym LM (Lesley Moore), is a unique figure: companion, servant, and muse of Katherine Mansfield. Her memoirs and published correspondence are critical for their intimate, unvarnished style, providing the primary lens through which scholars understand the domestic and psychological realities of Mansfield's creative life. During her lifetime, she was often dismissed by the Bloomsbury Group as a hovering, subservient presence—Virginia Woolf famously mocked her—but modern feminist scholarship has re-evaluated her legacy. Today, Baker is recognised as an integral collaborator in Mansfield's work, representing the hidden female labor that historically sustained high-modernist genius, and her writings are studied as vital documents of a complex, lifelong "Boston marriage."