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reflect something of the loneliness of the acts of writing and reading. With the modernist movement in the early years of the twentieth century, the form took on a particularly obsessive character, and writers like Katherine Mansfield (and James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence) made short stories into intensely crafted and evocative objects-on-the-page, sometimes with nearly no plot at all in the conventional sense. Katherine Mansfield put even more into the story form than her contemporaries, however, since it was really her only form. She sometimes regretted this – she joked that Jane Austen’s novels made ‘modern episodic people like me… look very incompetent ninnies’, and said to an old friend, sadly, at the end of her life, that all she’d produced were ‘little stories like birds bred in cages’. But her very dissatisfaction feeds into her stories, and gives them a special edge. And in any case, her pleasure in the form is clear. She felt at home in it, being so little at home anywhere else.

She left well-to-do New Zealand society behind in 1908 at the age of nineteen, but she remained something of an outsider in English literary circles. Her contacts with the people she met were eager, tense, competitive and mutually mistrustful. Most women in this world were helpmeets or patrons or muses or mistresses, not artists in their own right, as she wanted to be. And even in literary Bohemia the old social distinctions died hard. She was a colonial and her banker father was a self-made man, so that she fitted all too well into a certain ready-made snobbish stereotype: ‘provincial’, ‘trade’. It’s possible to recapture something of the impact she made on English sensibilities by looking at her relations with the one major woman writer she knew well, Virginia Woolf. Their on-off friendship was marked by conflicting feelings of alienation and intimacy. A diary entry by Woolf for 1917, after she and Leonard had had Mansfield to dinner, reads:

We could both wish that ones first impression of K.M. was not that she stinks like a – well civet cat that had taken to street walking. In truth I’m a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard & cheap. However when this diminishes, she is so intelligent & inscrutable that she repays friendship.

Even if you make allowance for Woolf’s habitual private savagery, this passage shows what a powerful physical presence Mansfield had. Pioneering Mansfield scholar and biographer Antony Alpers was puzzled by Woolf’s over-reaction. Katherine, he said in his 1980 Life, liked expensive French perfume (and dressed very well, for that matter). Perhaps the Woolfs thought it vulgar to wear scent at all? Alpers concluded that it must have been Mansfield’s passion for ‘the life of the senses’ that offended Woolf’s sensitive nose.

He was putting it too mildly. That ‘civet’ reference is to the secretions of the musk glands of a cat, once upon a time an ingredient for making scent. Woolf was probably thinking of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where bawdy Touchstone explains (Act III, scene 2) that sweet-smelling courtiers who use civet aren’t as clean as they seem, because ‘civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very uncleanly flux of a cat’. Put the implications together and Woolf is saying – with a sort of fascinated disgust – that Mansfield is like a tom-cat marking out its territory and (at the same time) a she-cat on heat. And of course the social and sexual messages are mixed up, too, so that the ‘lines’ of her personality seem ‘hard & cheap’. Yet in the next sentence she’s transformed into someone ‘intelligent and inscrutable’, a new kind of aloof and attractive cat who has an inner life. This was a sentiment Woolf repeated in a diary entry of 1920: ‘she is of the cat kind, alien, composed, always solitary & observant’. When she thought of Mansfield in this way Woolf felt very close to her: ‘… we talked about solitude, & I found her expressing my feelings as I never heard them expressed’. She felt, she said, ‘a queer sense of being “like” – not only about literature’; ‘to no-one else can I