Two French novels owned by Katherine Mansfield have recently come to light (now in a private collection): La Femme de Trente Ans (A Woman of Thirty) by Honoré de Balzac (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, c. 1900), and La Jeune Fille Bien Élevée (The Well-Bred Young Girl) by René Boylesve (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, c. 1919).

Both spines are backed with brown paper with autograph titles inscribed in ink by Mansield and John Middleton Murry respectively; given the publication date of the Boylesve volume, the repairs must have been carried out post-1919. The Balzac novel has Mansfield's signature on the first inside blank page, dated and located ‘at Marseilles, March 1916’. The Boylesve volume has her signature on the front wrapper. Murry has also written ‘Q7’ and ‘P3’ in pencil on the first inside blank page of each volume, as a shelf mark for his own library.

During the winter of 1915–16, Mansfield and Murry were to be found in Bandol on the French Riviera, initially at the Hotel Beau Rivage and subsequently from January 1916 at the Villa Pauline, where Mansfield started revising her story ‘The Aloe’, which would eventually be transformed into ‘Prelude’. Her sister Chaddie had written to her there, announcing she would be passing through Marseilles in late March; thus on 20 March, Mansfield travelled to Marseilles, taking a room at the Hotel Oasis where she and Murry had briefly stayed the previous November, on their way to Bandol. From there she wrote to Murry on 21 March: ‘Cooks […] referred me to the P and O people Rue Colbert (opposite the Post office).