Aside from the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, NZ, which houses the world's largest collection of material relating to Katherine Mansfield, there are two libraries in the USA which also contain significant collections of Mansfield material. The Newberry Library in Chicago contains substantial deposits of Mansfield manuscripts collected by Jane Warner Dick, a prolific collector from Chicago, who bequeathed her collection to the Newberry. The other main repository of material pertaining to Mansfield is the Ruth Elvish Mantz Collection, held in the Harry Ransom Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mantz's (1896–1978) early enthusiasm for Mansfield led to a dissertation at Stanford University in the late 1920s, followed by the publication of a Critical Biography of Katherine Mansfield (1931), to which Mansfield's husband and editor, John Middleton Murry (in a gesture which must have appeared thrilling to the young researcher), contributed a brief biographical note. Buoyed up by this early publishing achievement, Mantz undertook an enormous amount of research for a new biography of Mansfield, The Life of Katherine Mansfield (1933), visiting New Zealand and England and interviewing many individuals who had known the writer, especially in her childhood home of Wellington.

However, Mantz, young and inexperienced, found herself at the mercy of Murry's editorial power. It was suggested by the publisher, Constable, that Murry rewrite parts of it; on 20 April 1933, he wrote to Mantz saying:

In addition, more sensitive than Mantz to those people mentioned in the biography who were still alive, Murry suggested to the American publishers of the book, Knopf, that he should ‘“tone down” anything offensive’, to which Mantz added a pencilled footnote, many years later: ‘at that time […] publishers feared any candid treatment of this material’. What, therefore, was originally intended to be a full biography of Mansfield, eventually became a rather fanciful, romantic, and in places inaccurate record of Mansfield's life up to the spring of 1912, when she and Murry became a couple.