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observing her fellow guests, and wrote to Ida Baker asking her to send her a child to look after, which Ida duly did (an eight-year-old boy called Charlie Walter, who was recovering from pleurisy, and who was sent back at the end of the summer, having served his purpose). She now met Floryan Sobieniowski, a Polish writer and translator who introduced her to Chekhov’s stories; they had an affair, and she contracted the gonorrhoea which – unrecognized and untreated – would give her agonizing rheumatic pains for years, and probably made her infertile. By the beginning of 1910 she was back in London (with the help of a ‘loan’ from Ida) and had produced a story freely adapted (some would say plagiarized) from Chekhov, ‘The-Child-Who-Was-Tired’, which was published in the magazine The New Age edited by A. R. Orage, who also printed a story called ‘Germans at Meat’. She settled on the name Katherine Mansfield, in life as well as on the page. Her writing career had begun.

It was small wonder that Woolf scented an adventuress. For Mansfield the years between 1908 and 1918 were hectic, crowded with people and restless with movement. By 1918 she had become seriously and unmistakably ill with TB, and had just begun to produce her best work – ‘grown up as a writer’, as she put it. She’d lived like someone on the run, an escapee from the prisons of respectability, making up her life as she went along, often disastrously, but at least the mistakes were hers. There is no room here for a blow-by-blow account, but two people in her history must be singled out, since they represent (apart from Ida) the nearest thing to continuity she could bear to claim: her second husband John Middleton Murry, and her brother Leslie Beauchamp.

Mansfield met Murry in December 1911, in March the following year he became a lodger in her flat, and shortly afterwards her lover. He was a year younger than she in literal fact, but a lot younger in other ways: a clever, charming, ambitious young man, making his own way in the world from humble origins, via Oxford, where he founded a short-lived little magazine called Rhythm, on which she joined him as a co-editor. They seem to have been surrogate siblings to each other: playfellows, chums and allies. Though he was a would-be novelist at the beginning, his was a critical sensibility, and it was as an editor, reviewer and critic that he would make his name, for the most part after her death. Their eventual marriage, after her divorce from Bowden in the spring of 1918, makes them sound a more settled couple than they were. Many commentators, looking back on Mansfield’s life-story, have found Murry wanting. He was slippery, resdess, indecisive, unreliable and seldom at her side when she needed him. On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel that – having made the running from the beginning – she continued the relationship less out of passion for him than out of a failure of energy and nerve. She was too ill and time was too short to go on the prowl any more.

Her brother, Leslie ‘Chummie’ Beauchamp, was twenty-one when he arrived in England in February 1915 to join up. After a spring and summer in officer training-school, he left for the Front in France in October, and a few days later he was killed in a grenade accident, ‘blown to bits’ in Katherine‘s words. During their re-acquaintance she had lied to him merrily about her relationship with Murry: ‘more than ever in love’, Leslie wrote to their parents. In fact, they were on the verge of parting company, and to prove the point and assert her independence, Katherine made her own excursion to the Front, unknown to Leslie. She went to join a lover, Francis Carco, a novelist of the Parisian underworld, and a friend of another writer–adventuress, Colette, and she succeeded in outwitting the military to join him for a brief idyll, which she described in her journal.

In a sense, this has little to do with her relations with her brother, except that, with both Leslie and Carco, what is striking is her sense of the man as a double, a kind of lover/brother, an other self. Describing