'Portrait of Katherine Mansfield' by Anne Estelle Rice, June 1918, © National Museum, Wellington

288p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 1903155592

Katherine Mansfield’s Journal is one of the great classics of twentieth century literature; it is a uniquely truthful record of a great writer at work, of the spirit of a genius in the last ten years of her life, and of the development of the modern mind during the early years of the last century. Her husband John Middleton Murry compiled the Journal soon after she died and it was published in 1927. It consists of fragments of diary entries, unposted letters, scraps of writing, in other words anything that was dated or could have a date attributed to it and that could be woven into a volume called a ‘journal’. Katherine Mansfield’s Journal is far more than an intermittent record of twelve years of a writer’s life: it is intensely observant, self-critical, self-chastising, confessional, atmospheric, agonised and funny, an essential document for anyone interested in women’s writing of the last century and in one of its greatest writers.

Endpapers taken from 'Amenophis III' by Roger Fry, a printed linen designed in 1913 for the Omega Workshops