‘There is no happiness greater than this leading a double life’, Katherine Mansfield remarks on her life as a writer to the novelist William Gerhardie in June 1922. What Mansfield calls the ‘mysterious’ experience of writing involves being both ‘here in this remote, deserted hotel ’ in Montana-sur-Sierre in Switzerland and at the same time ‘in’ the story she is writing, ‘The Doves’ Nest’, a story set in a villa in the south of France. ‘How is it possible to be here in this remote, deserted hotel’, she asks, ‘and at the same time to be leaning out of the window of the Villa Martin listening to the rain thrumming so gently on the leaves and smelling the night-scented stocks […]’ (LKM ii. 218). One of the most important short story writers in English, Mansfield may be said to have revolutionized her chosen form. Since her death in 1923, the reception of Mansfield's fictions has been bound up with her letters and notebooks and with accounts of her life. And yet many of the letters, notebooks, and stories are concerned to examine, in different ways, the complex relationship between writing and life, between story and autobiography, to examine the strangeness of the writer's ‘double life’, to ask the question: how is it possible to be here writing in this hotel and at the same time there, in the villa of fiction? This book focuses on Mansfield's ‘double life’, attempting to account for the relationship between Mansfield's life and her writing, and to examine that sense of the strange, the ‘mysterious’ nature of the act of writing.

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born on 14 October 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a successful businessman who rose to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. In 1903, at the age of 14, Mansfield was sent to England with her sisters to complete her education in London, where at Queen's College she met Ida Baker, who was to become a lifelong friend and companion. She returned to New Zealand in December 1906 for eighteen months, during which time she had love affairs with at least two women and went on a formative month-long camping expedition in the Urewera region of the North Island.