All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything
Claire Harman
** The Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023**
** A Waterstones Best Book of 2023**
** A Financial Times Best Summer Books of 2023 **
'All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work' A.L. KENNEDY
Published to celebrate Katherine Mansfield's centenary, this is a compact but comprehensive new portrait of her life, work, relevance and wonderfully inspiring personality
Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield's short but dazzling career was characterised by struggle, insecurity and sacrifice - alongside a glorious, relentless creative drive and openness.
She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, 'Where is she - our missing contemporary?' Now, looking back over the hundred years since her death, it is evident how vital Mansfield was to the Modernist movement and how strikingly relevant she is today, helping us to see differently, to savour and to notice things.
In this dynamic and perceptive study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield's life and achievements side by side, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield's desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: 'Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small.'
Inventive, intimate and informative, All Sorts of Lives is the perfect introduction for those who aren't familiar with Mansfield's work and, for those who are, it offers a new way of viewing and celebrating her and her legacy.
Product Details
About Claire Harman
Reviews for All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything
A.L. KENNEDY In this sensitive and comprehensive biography, Claire Harman uncovers some steamy new details about Mansfield’s bisexuality, but doesn’t let the life distract from the blisteringly intense stories
The Times,
Books of the Year
What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity - and that's before you start on Mansfield as a leading modernist . . . It's hard to imagine a more compelling advocate for Mansfield's fiction, or a better introduction to it . . . brilliant
Claire Lowdon
Sunday Times
A wonderful book to mark the centenary of Mansfield's death . . . [her] clever insistence on placing the life and work side by side allows her to give brief but powerful accounts of Mansfield's relations with other writers
Ruth Scurr
Spectator
Harman combines literary criticism with uncovering the life of the influential modernist writer, via chapters linked to individual short stories. The best literary biographies make you want to go back to the subject’s work with renewed passion, and Harman more than succeeds. In fact, her enthusiasm goes some way into bringing Mansfield’s own vitality to the page
Independent, Books of the Year
A kind of masterclass on the short story, taking the ideal practitioner as its focus . . . a valuable reminder of why - a hundred years after her death - we should still be reading and marvelling at Katherine Mansfield's stories
Sarah Watling
Daily Telegraph
A worthy addition to the corpus of Mansfield interpretation . . . Like all the best writer biographies, All Sorts of Lives makes you reach again for the works
Catherine Taylor
Financial Times
Step aside, Virginia Woolf - it was Katherine Mansfield who ushered in the modern age
Frances Wilson
Daily Telegraph
An excellent, sensitively written introduction
Miranda Seymour
The Times
An engaging, perceptive critical work, that is inseparable from the rich expanse of Mansfield biography. What the book so insists on, and so compellingly brings home, is Mansfield's utter commitment to the demands of writing
Vincent O'Sullivan
Newsroom
What a searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand, it achieves a beautiful synthesis between Mansfield's stories, her life and our apprehension of both these things
Sunjeev Sahota Sensitive and comprehensive
Susie Goldsbrough
The Times
Harman's book does that thing that all good literary biographies do. It sends us straight back into the delicate, exhilarating, risking world of Mansfield's fiction
Kirsty Gunn
The Times Literary Supplement
[A] lucent biography
Tablet
This biography, graced by Harman's deep understanding as a reader, allows the work and the life to unfold side by side, a pairing designed for maximum impact... puts art - the beating heart of a writer's life - centre stage
Lyndall Gordon
New Statesman