'I read it with huge enjoyment - I think it's by far the best Katherine Mansfield biography yet - giving a truthful but still sympathetic portrait.' Jacqueline Wilson, novelist & patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society 'Jones ... writes with insight and verve, and an intelligent sympathy as her story is set out against those overlapping literary and social worlds the writer passes through ... A mass of new material unavailable to earlier biographers makes this new telling richly detailed and compelling.' Vincent O'Sullivan, co-editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield 'What [emerges] with indisputable clarity from Jones's skilful use of her sources is a portrait of Mansfield, stylish and febrile, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, relishing life, scrutinising it with her keen intelligence, and recording her perceptions in a voice that continues to unsettle and surprise.' Pamela Norris, Literary Review 'A compelling narrative of a writer's passion for her work, her growth to maturity and the extraordinary trajectory which took a plump, awkward, rebellious little girl from a rigidly conventional family halfway across the world and into a culture of artistic, social and sexual experimentation.' Helen Dunmore, novelist About the Author Kathleen Jones is a biographer, journalist and writer of fiction, general non-fiction and poetry. Her other biographies include: Catherine Cookson: The Biography (1999), A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets (1997), Learning not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti (1991) and A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673 (1988). Kathleen is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. www.kathleenjones.co.uk Front Cover: Detail, Katherine Mansfield, Portrait by Anne Estelle Rice, Te Papa museum, New Zealand. Cover Design: Neil Ferber