New essays and creative explorations of the friendship, milieu and writings of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
'I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend ... pray consider how rare it is to find someone with the same passion for writing, who desires to be scrupulously truthful - and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all.'
Katherine Mansfield's ardent overture to Virginia Woolf launched a historic friendship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with wary misunderstandings, rivalry and envy. These comparative essays explore the shared terrain of these modernist women writers and shed new light on their 'curious & thrilling' literary relationship - absorbing, intimate, distant, secretly critical, competitive, sometimes foundering in 'quicksands' - and its profound impact on their creative imaginations.

Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story. A Professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin's primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group. Christine Froula is a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University, a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society. She has published widely on interdisciplinary modernism, feminist theory, and genetic criticism, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (Columbia UP, 2007).