Pierce Butler, A Child of the Sun (Mount Desert: Beech Hill, 2016), 184 pp., £11.50. ISBN 9780990820086

Sandra Jobson, ‘Introduction’, in D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (Strawberry Hills, NSW: Svengali Press, 2016), 496 pp., £22.30. ISBN 9781925416473

Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 272 pp., £30.00. ISBN 9780748681457

Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison, eds, The Collected Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 216 pp., £75.00. ISBN 9781474417273

Sarah Laing, Mansfield and Me: A Graphic Memoir (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016), 344 pp., £18.85. ISBN 978177656091

Todd Martin, ed., Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 272 pp., £84.99. ISBN 9781474298988

Julian Murphet, Helen Groth and Penelope Hone, eds, Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modernist Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 264 pp., £75.00. ISBN 9781474416368

Redmer Yska, A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield's Wellington 1888–1903 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2017), 296 pp., £21.50. ISBN 9780947522544

In July 1920 Katherine Mansfield expostulated in a notebook: ‘True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well really, that's what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves?’ (CW4, p. 349). This oft-quoted rhetorical question illustrates not only Mansfield's engagement with contemporary notions of the multiplicity of the modernist subject but the scepticism it leads her to express about ‘our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent […] untouched by all we acquire and all we shed’ (CW4, p. 350). Mansfield's refusal to subscribe to such a mystique of personal identity ironically foreshadows the shifting, ephemeral posthumous selves characterising her own literary reputation. Following her death in 1923 and, indeed, during her lifetime, the efforts of friends, contemporaries and critics to draw and re-draw Mansfield's definitive portrait have resulted in an image neither continuous nor permanent, but one which remains elusive, indistinct and out of focus.

The publication of Mansfield's personal papers by her husband John Middleton Murry has doubtless done little to dispel this impression. As noted in Antony Alpers's biography of Mansfield, publications of her private letters and notebooks were extensively edited, with many harsh comments about friends and fellow-writers removed.