Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield is now seen as one most important figures in modernism, but in her time she was seen as an outsider, a “colonial” who veered too much towards the unruly. She had a tense friendship with Virginia Woolf and others of the group, and there are accounts of its members describing her as inelegant and crass. She was influenced by the Bloomsbury Group, and felt attracted to them, but her position of outsider allowed her to mock them and criticise them, both in her writing an in her life. Her short stories are often testaments to a life on the fringe, and the freedom and loneliness it entails.