The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure, then finally on something very different--if death came to seem inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one could truly say one lived?
Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine, for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She went against what her education, her husband, and most of her friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last months with Russian emigres and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff disciples (which she was not). But Fontainebleau give her the space and the incentive to shake free from the intellectualism that she thought the malaise of her time, as she worked at kitchen chores, took in the details of farm life, tried to learn Russian, and attempted to reach total honesty with herself. "If I were allowed one simple cry to God," she wrote in one of her last letters, "that cry would be I want to be REAL."

With the exception of the first four stories, all were written within a period of ten years. These stories, and the letters following, reflect the urgency of a writer who knew her time was limited. All but four of the texts of the stories reprinted here are versions that Mansfield herself revised or selected. Twenty excerpts from Mansfield s correspondence address the craft of writing and her own views on her work, subjects rarely broached in her many letters. "Criticism" includes eighteen essays that collectively suggest the changing emphases in how Mansfield has been read by critics. Contributors include fellow writers Rebecca West, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, V. S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Bowen, and Frank O Connor, as well as biographers Claire Tomalin and Vincent O Sullivan, among others. A Selected Bibliography is also included."

This is the first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield's fiction. The resurgence of interest in Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) in recent years has grown to the extent that she is now perceived as 'the most emblematic woman writer of her time'. Mansfield researchers have been frequently frustrated by the lack of a complete edition of her fiction. There are several editions of her stories in print, but these omit many pieces not already collected and published in the volumes edited by Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry after her death, from which present 'collected' editions derive. This Edinburgh edition of her stories, published to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of her death in 1923, is a truly complete collection of the author's fiction writing. The editors have sought to include hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments as well as the instantly recognisable stories. Placed in chronological order and fully annotated with clear, concise notes, this edition undertakes a complete remapping of the author's fiction output, from her earliest childhood pieces to the pitch-perfect quality of the mature writer at the height of her craft, thereby redefining Katherine Mansfield as a writer for the twenty-first century. Key features: brings together all of Mansfield's extant fiction; refocuses critical attention on one of the most influential exponents of modernist fiction; the essential Mansfield text for individual scholars working on Mansfield studies, as well as those with a more general interest in Mansfield the writer; and, redefines Mansfield as a writer for the next generation.

The letters in this volume cover the eighteen months Katherine Mansfield spent in England, France and Switzerland from May 1920 to the end of 1921. It is the period of her finest stories, and when her life took its most decisive turn. There is a subtle but unmistakable change in her expectations, a new 'spiritual' insistence that is both elusive and resolute. From her Chekovian acceptance that 'they are cutting down the cherry trees' she derives a tough existential directness: 'the little boat enters the dark, fearful gulf ... Nobody listens. The shadowy figure rows on. One ought to sit still and uncover one's eyes.' There is a determined push - not always successful - towards a necessary honesty, as much as to artistic achievement; while those qualities of her earlier correspondence remain undiminished - the precision and directness, the intelligence and wit, the dark incisiveness as much as sheer fun. Above all, perhaps, these letters comprise a record of very considerable courage, against increasingly adverse odds, as they approach the final years of her life.

This is the first complete edition of Katherine Mansfield's fiction. The resurgence of interest in Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) in recent years has grown to the extent that she is now perceived as 'the most emblematic woman writer of her time'. Mansfield researchers have been frequently frustrated by the lack of a complete edition of her fiction. There are several editions of her stories in print, but these omit many pieces not already collected and published in the volumes edited by Mansfield's husband John Middleton Murry after her death, from which present 'collected' editions derive. This Edinburgh edition of her stories, published to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of her death in 1923, is a truly complete collection of the author's fiction writing. The editors have sought to include hitherto uncollected or rarely seen stories and prose fragments as well as the instantly recognisable stories. Placed in chronological order and fully annotated with clear, concise notes, this edition undertakes a complete remapping of the author's fiction output, from her earliest childhood pieces to the pitch-perfect quality of the mature writer at the height of her craft, thereby redefining Katherine Mansfield as a writer for the twenty-first century. Key features: brings together all of Mansfield's extant fiction; refocuses critical attention on one of the most influential exponents of modernist fiction; the essential Mansfield text for individual scholars working on Mansfield studies, as well as those with a more general interest in Mansfield the writer; and, redefines Mansfield as a writer for the next generation.

The third volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield covers the eight months she spent in Italy and the South of France between the English summers of 1919 and 1920. It was a time of intense personal reassessment and distress. Mansfield's relationship with her husband John Middleton Murry was bitterly tested, and most of the letters in this present volume chart that rich and enduring partner'ship through its severest trial. This was a time, too, when Mansfield came to terms with the closing off of possibilities that her illness entailed. Without flamboyance or fuss, she felt it necessary to discard earlier loyalties and even friendships, as she sought for a spiritual standpoint that might turn her illness to less negative ends. As she put it, 'One must be ... continually giving & receiving, and shedding & renewing, & examining & trying to place'. For all the grimness of this period of her life, Mansfield's letters still offer the joie de vivre and wit, self-perception and lively frankness that make her correspondence such rewarding reading - an invaluable record of a `modern' woman and her time.

Volume II of the five-volume Collected Letters begins with Mansfield's stay at Bandol in the early months of 1918 and follows her until she leaves for the Continent in September 1919. This volume, like the first, demonstrates her brilliance as a correspondent--her wit as well as her warmth, her deftness in conveying places and personalities, the vitality of her tastes and enthusiasms--and it also reveals the wide swings and dark alternations of her moods. The letters here are dominated by her love for Middleton Murry, her response to the First World War, and the ways in which she accepted the inevitable advance of her tuberculosis. They are as courageous as they are frank, and shot through with the intelligence and flair that would prompt Virginia Woolf, a few years later, to write that with Mansfield's death she had lost her greatest rival, and the person whose literary opinion she most valued.

"A Dissertation Upon Second Fiddles", first published in 1902 is a collection of four, slightly interconnected, stories. O'Sullivan's characters flit between the stories, all of which have a slightly moralistic purpose. However, O'Sullivan's macabre sense of humour ensures that the tales do not preach, and he puts his black wit to good use in this hard-to-find collection. "Of Kindred" describes a mysterious German stranger proffering advice to the large and corpulent Sir Hugh Anger so that he can resolve his hypochondria and live a longer, healthier life. "Of Accomplices" is the story of Shawlcoat Vellery, a good and virtuous man, who rather bored with his righteousness, comes across the anarchical and nihilistic Labour Argan. Vellery decides to act as Argan's henchman in various schemes but the results are not as anticipated. "Of Friends" describes Nicolas and his wife Hester. The pompous Nicolas is persuaded to make a speech for a local politician but it ends disastrously when Nicolas is attacked and beaten by ruffians. While Nicolas is recovering in bed, the MP, a portly gentleman of some 50 years, who has admired Nicolas's russet-haired wife with her "strong white neck, and the perfect and most pleasing harmony of her whole frame", takes his chance to try "to beat down the guard" of the unfortunate Hester. "Of Enemies" is the tale of a flighty, yet pretty, novelist, Mrs Ardour, who comes across a short story in an obscure magazine. She decides to steal the plot and sets on writing a novel based on the story. When the original writer discovers this plagiarism, Mrs Ardour uses all her skills and wiles to ruin him completely.

"To help a man is like reviving an assassin who has designs on your life. ... A sense of obligation engenders a sense of hate." This book of monologues contains twenty-five short, pithy, often cynical, prose pieces from the acerbic pen of the late nineteenth-century writer, Vincent O'Sullivan. First published in 1899, the collection captures the aesthetics of the Decadence movement with its emphasis on excess, transgression and sensuality. O'Sullivan's circle included Oscar Wilde, Leonard Smithers, Aubrey Beardsley and other fin-de-siecle luminaries. O'Sullivan provides each monologue with an enigmatic mononym, such as 'Sob', 'Wear', 'Crave'. A concept that is extended in this edition by the inclusion of images, notably Beardsley's "The Litany of Mary Magdalen", to accompany, but not necessarily to illustrate, the prose. Vincent O'Sullivan (1868-1940) was born into a prosperous Irish American family in New York and moved to London as a child. He spent much of his life in the demi-monde world that is the setting of his books and stories, ultimately dying penniless and being buried in a pauper's grave in Paris.