Close readers of Katherine Mansfield will recall her bold decision in the autumn of 1922 to become a resident at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, founded by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (?1866–1949), not far from Paris, just weeks before her death. Mansfield could have some confidence in the adventure: she would share it with A. R. Orage, her trusted mentor, who had set aside his prominent literary and journalistic career in London to also join Gurdjieff and his circle. The new home of the Institute was Le Prieuré des Basses Loges, a manor house at Fontainebleau-Avon, adjoining the storied forest where kings had hunted. Gurdjieff was – and has remained – a controversial figure, deeply appreciated by some, maligned by others. We should content ourselves here with Mansfield's vision of the man as a wise, multi-talented and kind teacher, willing to number her among the Institute's participants despite the fact that he knew her to be mortally ill. She had come to remake her life: if not her health – though there is always hope – then her inner life, her sense of herself. ‘At 34 I am beginning my education,’ she wrote with conviction after some weeks at the Prieuré. It did not take long for her to know that she belonged, frail as she was. How touching to hear her write about ‘the new theatre that we are building. I must go.’

Gurdjieff's establishment in France marked the end of a long, often ferociously trying emigration from Moscow and St Petersburg, where he had begun to teach a new embodiment of traditional spirituality, cosmology and ethics during the period 1912–17. Greek-Armenian by birth, Russian by education, he and his companions had searched for some twenty years in Central Asia, India, North Africa and the worlds of Orthodox Christianity for hidden sources of knowledge. The Russian revolution and civil war prompted him to move with a handful of students, first to the temporary safety of the Caucasus, later to Istanbul, on to Dresden, then an exploratory look at England – and finally France, which became his home. It asks too much to evoke here the outlines of Gurdjieff's teaching, the dances and music, and his novel approach to what he called work on oneself, but much is implicit in Mansfield's letters from the Prieuré.