All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything

by Claire Harman

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Literary Criticism

304 pages, Hardcover

Published January 5, 2023

About the author

Claire Harman began her career in publishing, at Carcanet Press and the poetry magazine PN Review, where she was co-ordinating editor.

Her first book, a biography of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, was published in 1989 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for ‘a writer of growing stature’ under the age of 35. She has since published biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson and edited works by Stevenson and Warner. She writes short stories for radio and publication and was runner-up for the V.S.Pritchett prize for short fiction in 2008. Her latest book is a mixture of biography and criticism, Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World.

Claire has taught English at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. She has appeared on radio and television and writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic, reviewing books, films, plays and exhibitions.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.

Reviews

[Margo Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each chapter of 'All Sorts of Lives' begins with a discussion of one of Katherine Mansfield's short stories, followed by a passage of biography. It flows along beautifully. Claire Harman chooses vivid quotes and anecdotes which bring KM to life on the page, and writes with a lightness of touch which suggests both deep research and delight in her subject. Mansfield's voice comes across strongly, as when dissing a measly birthday present from her wealthier sisters: "I shall keep this matchbox for ever and remember the size of their hearts by it... They are made for comedy." (p.99).

It helps that, in Lorna Sage's words, Katherine Mansfield "lived like someone on the run" - restless, chaotic, taking risks, experimenting with literary aliases, forging intense relationships. There's empathy here for her hapless second husband, John Middleton Murry, who - in a gift for biographers - ignored Mansfield's direction to destroy her personal papers after her death, and instead published many of her drafts, letters, notebooks and unfinished stories, to the point where some of her friends accused him of "boiling Katherine's bones to make soup."

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Our missing contemporary' is how Elizabeth Bowen described [Katherine Mansfield] in the 1940s, lamenting the writer's early death: 'page after page gives off the feeling of being still warm from the touch, fresh from the pen'.

I started reading this unsure whether Harman would have anything else to say about Mansfield after Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life - but I was wrong and very happy to be so.

Harman has organised this in ten chapters each titled from one of Mansfield's stories and segues between the tale and Mansfield's life. She doesn't force spurious connections and Mansfield herself was quite explicit about her fiction being an 'escape from autobiography'. So the parallels are more chronological than thematic, tracing Mansfield's development as a writer against her tragically foreshortened life.

The commentary on the stories is interesting but not systematically analytical: Harman does some light storytelling for readers who are unfamiliar with the tales and points out, especially, the formal characteristics of Mansfield's style, not least the way she spontaneously adopts stream of consciousness and close third person narrations before they became modernist 'things'. There's something very luminous about Mansfield's writing not just in the painterly descriptions suffused with light and colour but also the way her narratorial eye adopts the techniques of the cinematic camera with panoramic shots, close-ups, flashbacks.

Inevitably, this doesn't offer the concentrated biographical detail of Tomalin so I'd see the two books as beautifully complementary. What Harman adds, though, is a personal warmth, a subjectivity and emotion that a more formal biography has to eschew. This book feels like a labour of love and there's a palpable tenderness, never sentimental, for this woman who was so alive, so complex and awkward, cruel and bitingly funny, bold and courageous, sensual and sexual.

Harman's adroit use of Mansfield's letters and journals ensures that her own authentic voice is heard throughout in all its tones and variations. And by interspersing the life with the work, this reiterates what an artist Mansfield was, always striving, always thinking about writing, always pushing herself to do more, to do things differently, to capture the very essence of life in text... even in the face of suffering and the spectre of early death.

Tonight when the evening star shone through the side window and the pale mountains were so lovely I sat there thinking of death, of all there was to do - of Life which is so lovely - and of the fact that my body is a prison.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing approach to Mansfield’s life and art that works well for most of the book. Make sure you visit each story (all available online) before continuing to the next chapter for maximum enjoyment.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, which I bought on a whim mainly for the title. It is a biography of the writer Katherine Mansfield, who to be honest I had not heard of before. I will look up her writing now though for sure.

I have a soft spot for the creative outsider, who in a short life gives all for his or her art, and in some way change the development of their field - they are not always the nicest or easiest of people, but they are certainly some of the most interesting. (Think, for example of Rimbaud or Van Gogh). I am interested in people who are so driven by their need to engage in whatever is their creative milieu. It's not about success or recognition - I'm not saying they don't want them, they mostly do, but that is not the main driving force. The title implied Mansfield fitted into this rough categorisation for me, and having read the book I think she does.

The book has an interesting structure. I think Harman has not only presented a compelling portrait of Mansfield, but has done something original herself. There are ten chapters and each one starts with a summary of a piece of Mansfield's work and what makes it so good. She then follows this with biographical notes about Mansfield. Some of these relate to the work discussed, some of them are simply the point in her life and the influences she was under at this point. It is like a biography, literary criticism and education all in one. Highly recommended.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across All Sorts of Lives, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything,  via Brona's review of Claire Tomlin's biography — both books published to coincide with the anniversary of the death of New Zealand's best-known author Katherine Mansfield in 1923.

I had already read a Kathleen Jones' wonderful biography Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller (2010), not to mention C.K. Stead's novelisation Mansfield, (2004), but I do like a literary analysis of an author's writing, as long as it's not so scholarly that I feel out of my depth. Or that I have to Make An Effort instead of just enjoying myself.

Well, I did have to Make a Bit of An Effort with Harman's book, because although I've read Mansfield's collections and her novella...

In a German Pension (1911), 
The Garden Party (1922), and
The Aloe (published posthumously in 1930),

... I hadn't read all the short stories that Harman explores and so I had to engage in the pleasurable task of finding them online and reading them.

Chapter One starts with How Pearl Button was Kidnapped (1912), and here it is — online at the Katherine Mansfield Society's site —  if you want to read it too.  It was first published under a nom-de-plume in the avant-garde monthly Rhythm which was edited by her husband-to-be John Middleton Murry but soon became a joint venture between them.  Apparently, as well as editing, KM wrote quite a bit for this journal: poems, fiction and book reviews but these were not always under her name because they didn't want Rhythm to have 'too much' of her work in it.

Harman says that Pearl Button wasn't identified as one of KM's until it was included in a posthumous collection.  (Unless I missed it, Harman doesn't say which one.  It's in my 2007 Penguin Classics Collected Stories, which was first published by Constable in 1945, maybe that one?)  It's not long — only about 1000 words —and it's a story which would seem less disquieting without that word 'kidnapped' in its title.  Pearl, playing in her front garden, is beguiled into joining a couple of women who take her for a long walk, and then a ride in a cart down to the sea which she has never seen before.  She has a lovely time.  She is cuddled, and carried, and fed treats.  Nobody gets cross when she spills food on her clothes, and she is made a fuss of because her new 'dark' friends are enchanted by her blonde curls. She is never frightened at all, and it is not until a crowd of little blue men arrive to take her back where she belongs, that the reader is made aware that there's been a hue-and-cry over her disappearance and that the little blue men knew exactly where to find her.  As Harman says, the story relies heavily on withholding all sorts of information...

The location is exotic but not specified; the protagonist is guileless yet unreliable; the plot develops but isn't in any ordinary sense resolved.  We are told the story entirely from the point of view of Pearl, a child of about three years old, who has been left to look after herself while her mother is busy working. (p.18)

Harman notes that this is an early work, of an unsubtle kind of simplicity and has the air of an experiment, or fragment of something bigger.  

But the cleverness of the story, and the thing that Mansfield learned to exploit more effectively later, is in the manipulation of the point of view.  In 'Pearl Button' she is using what is (now) called 'free indirect discourse' or a 'close third person' voice, that is, writing as if the narrator is passing on a character's experiences and thoughts, but not judging them. Or not appearing to judge them, for of course there's always space between the author and the narrator in which to plant doubts and ironies; that's what the space is for. (p.19)

The reader's doubt about Pearl's delightful day arises because of that word in the title.

From there, Harman goes on to explore the biographical origins of the themes of Otherness, belonging and an awakening sensuality that permeate Mansfield's fiction.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/06/15/a...

PS: Alas, I didn’t get to finish this absorbing book because there are eight reserves on it at the library and they won’t let me renew it. When the enthusiasm dies down, I’ll borrow it again.

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire Harman takes a really different approach to Katherine Mansfield. I found it fascinating, there’s new material plus keen eyed analysis of favourite short stories. Harman selects these particular favourites and starts the dissection with an account of what goes on. Then the author turns and relates it to the events and stages in Katherine Mansfield’s life. I was very interested in both parts of this writing. I loved this book.

[Ella Barfoot · Rating 5 out of 5]

gosh.

i LOVE katherine mansfield so much. i did my undergrad dissertation on her, and found her writing style absolutely fascinating. considered the only worthy rival by woolf, she is a phenomena - a creative rarity that lived a life that matched the intensity of her work. she could be brutal, charming, romantic, divisive. as harman repeatedly shows, she was also truly in love with with her work and with life, which is especially heartbreaking, given that she died at 34.

i learnt so much about mansfield’s life from harman; the writing of this book is warm, tender, inviting and educational - it is the championing of a force to be reckoned with, yet does not shy away from the moments mansfield perhaps let herself down. but never does harman criticise or evoke shame - the celebration in this book is as much of mansfield’a achievements as it is her flaws; it’s a celebration of a full and honest life.

i really enjoyed the analysis of the short stories (most i was very familiar with because of my dissertation) and each following section on her life. both were thorough, informative, and creatively inspiring. harman does much to use her own intellect, passion and humour to match the writing of mansfield. i particularly loved that in the academic study of mansfield’s works in this book, harman does not shy away from using exclamation marks, affirming her own excitement and encouraging ours.

sometimes i found keeping track of the dates difficult, as in one chapter we might be predominantly in 1922, and then would move to 1918 for most of the next (estimates of the dates). i also found that sometimes too much analysis of one short text was considered alongside the story that was the chapter’s focus - i didn’t mind this too much but i remember a moment when i started to feel genuinely confused as to why another text was receiving so much attention, and had to check the title of the section.

but ultimately, i really loved this book. i expect i shall read it again. mansfield is something of a heroine to me; she lived boldly, despite the constraints of her illness, and wrote brilliantly. so prone to dismiss her own work a while after its publication, and to repeatedly promise that in her next bout of creativity she would fully dominate her desired art form, she is so much like myself and my friends that it is impossible not to like her. yes she could be brutal and unkind, and i do feel sorry for murry and baker. but she has this charm, sincerity and disarming attitude that radiates through her letters and just fills me with adoration. i also just find her writing style massively inspires my own creativity.

i could not put this book down, and eagerly anticipate the day when it strikes me to pick it up again. in the meantime, i shall definitely be returning to some of mansfield’s stories!

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This glowing tribute to the life and work of Katherine Mansfield is part literary criticism (ecstatic appreciation) and part biography. Ten short stories by KM meander through an inspired account of her extraordinary life - a structure musically akin to the Rococo Variations, of which I’d like to think the aspiring cellist in KM might approve.

[Ali W · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the format of this book - describing one of Mansfield’s stories and then putting it in the context of her life and relationships. An innovative and highly readable biography.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a cleverly constructed biography. Harmen uses 10 of Mansfield's short stories, one for each chapter. She talks about the short story that she is covering in the first half of each chapter and then moves into the life of Mansfield in the second half of the chapter. This way you get insight into how the life and experiences of Mansfield influenced her writing. I read each short story first and then read the chapter of the book. To do that I used Wild Places, selected stories by Katherine Mansfield, which is, in a way, a companion book to this biography and has an introduction by Claire Harman.

This biography is for lovers of Katherine Mansfield or for those interested in learning more about her life and work. She had a very poor relationship with her parents, suffered from poor and worsening health and clearly struggled with life and finding her place in it. Her short stories reflect that challenge and provide insight into how she saw the world. Her style and approach to short story writing was ground breaking for its times. It is noticeable that her style mellows with age, in Prelude, for example. She has a huge talent. Maybe in today's world she would be diagnosed ADHD. She certainly has the drive and intensity ofter associated with ADHD.

I was fascinated by her relationships with other authors, in particular her relationship with Virginia Woolfe. They are not natural bedfellows in any sense but there is a shared fervour for taking writing to new places and to new heights. And that fed their unusual and largely professional friendship. I was once again struck by how authors and other creatives formed social circles filled with intellectual discussion in days gone by. I wonder what has replaced this in modern society. This is more than discussions over food and wine.

I would recommend this biography read in conjunction with the short stories. It is a wonderful intellectual deep dive.

[Naomi J · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I want, by understanding myself, to understand others (…) to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small- but that is the satisfaction of writing.”

Said to be the only writer Virginia Woolf was ever jealous of, Katherine Mansfield was a talented short story writer and was one of the first writers to push the capabilities and format of the short story as a genre.

In this unusually structured biography, Claire Harman has chosen ten of Mansfield’s short stories, giving each short story its own chapter. In each chapter Claire Harman first describes the story and the literary techniques being employed and developed by Mansfield. She then analyses and describes the events in Mansfield’s life when she wrote the short story. This, not only gives us a deeper appreciation of the technical brilliance of Mansfield’s short stories but also reveals the influences from Mansfield’s life upon her work.

The stories Harman has chosen are:
1. How Pearl Button was Kidnapped
2. The Tiredness of Rosabel
3. The Child Who Was Tired
4. The Daughters of the Late Colonel
5. An Indiscreet Journey
6. Bliss
7. Je ne parle pas francais
8. Prelude
9. The Garden Party
10. The Fly

I definitely recommend buying “Wild Places” - an anthology of Mansfield’s stories in which all the stories mentioned in “All sorts of lives” appear, along with others. You can then read the actual Mansfield short story after reading its chapter in “All sorts of lives.”

Has anyone else out there read any of Mansfield’s short stories?
If so, which one is your favourite? My personal favourite is “The Garden Party” which I think is the most perfect short story ever written.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘As we reach the centenary of this singular writer’s death, it seems a good time to take a fresh look at her life and her achievements side by side, through the form she did much to revolutionise: the short story.’

Born Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) in New Zealand on 14 October 1888, Katherine Mansfield’s contemporaries included James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D H Lawrence. She wrote short stories as well as letters and reviews in a prolific career cut short by her death from tuberculosis on 9 January 1923.

Ms Harman’s biography is constructed around ten of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. In the first part of each chapter, Ms Harman writes about a particular short story, in the second part she writes about Katherine Mansfield’s short, turbulent life. Katherine Mansfield moved to the UK in 1903 where her life became both bohemian and chaotic. Her relationship with her parents was difficult, her health was poor.

I confess: while I have read very little of Katherine Mansfield’s work, reading this book has me
wanting to read more. I am intrigued by her friendship with Virginia Woolf, and the failed attempt by her and John Murry at communal living with the Lawrences in Cornwall.

I think I’ll read this book again, when I’ve tracked down more of Katherine Mansfield’s work.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Delphine · Rating 4 out of 5]

All sorts of lives: Katherine Mansfield and the art of risking everything was published to celebrate Katherine Mansfield's centenary in 2023. In it, author Claire Harman explores 10 pivotal short stories which offer a fresh view on Mansfield's life and achievements.

Mansfield's life has already been thoroughly researched and recreated by Claire Tomalin in her excellent biography Katherine Mansfield: a secret life. The added value of Harman's book is her focus on Mansfield's experimental literary techniques, which paved the way to modernism. Mansfield introduced free indirect discourse into the short story, interior monologue and a floating narrative structure. Inspired by cinematic innovations, it enhanced the view of the self as endlessly shifting and reveals Manfield's uncanny ability to recreate semblances from real life.

Harman's ordering of the selected short stories is chronological. She establishes brief links to Mansfield's life but shies away from an overtly autobiographical explanation, which is just as Mansfield would have liked it.

[Karen Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

With all the celebrations this year (100 years since Mansfields death) I decided it was tiem to revisit my Mansfield experience.

Rather than re-reading her writing, I'll do this later in the year, I have decided to approach several texts on her work. None published when I first read Manfield 4-5 decades ago.

The first is All Sorts of Lives. Harman approached Mansfield's thoughts, expereinces, observations through those of her own viewed through ten of Mansfield's short stories, 3-4 I had never or have no recollection of reading previously.

These stories observed roughly in chronologial order contain historical context, context drawn from Mansfield's letters, diaries and notes. I found this witing fascinating it added much to my knowledge, historical context, new facts relating to Mansfield her life, and the lives of those around her.

I highly recommend this read, its bolsters the experience of reading her work and the times se lived in.

[Peter Dann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This gushing and disorganised account of Katherine Mansfield's life and literary work is an embarrassing failure. Harman's decision to tell the story of Mansfield's life through or around a retelling of some of Mansfield's stories turns out to be a poor one, and the unfortunate result is a "biography" that does justice to neither.

Some of Harman's readings of Mansfield's life circumstances (for example, the extravagant extrapolations she makes about the character of Mansfield's mother, based solely on photograhps of the woman) go well beyond the fanciful, while her readings of the stories rarely rise above the wooden, and are sometimes positively cloth-eared. How Harman can possibly have read "The Garden-Party" as a "charming" story more interested in class distinctions than anything else is beyond me.

[Sandybeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having never read anything by or about Katherine Mansfield, I finished this biography feeling slightly more educated in the short story form and about her, the woman. I read it as recommended along side Wild Places: Selected Stories. I feel that the biography would not have been as interesting if I had had no experience of Mansfield’s work. I cannot say that I love her writing or even that I liked her as a character. She seemed somewhat selfish, yet she lived a debilitating life in her last years, dying in a horrible manner from TB.

[Anne Herbison · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a reasonably well read New Zealander and a former English teacher to boot, I was astounded to discover how little I know of Katherine Mansfield and her work. I read the stories which were referred to in the text as I went, and was astounded again to find that some in my Collected Stories edition were still in censored form. Claire Harman is very enthusiastic about her subject, and one thing she wrote has stuck with me but, for the life of me I can't find it again. In reference to one part of one of her stories, she wrote that Mansfield had steamed straight through modernism and into post-modernism - pointing to her innovation which was well ahead of the time. I have heard there is a companion volume of the short stories referred to in the text which would be an excellent accompaniment.

[Cat]

needs to be read with the companion compilation of short stories edited by this same author of the biolgraphy all sorts of lives. Find here good reads doesn't seem to have it? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Places-... on amazon WILD PLACES

[Marie Day · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating insight into the life and talents of Katherine Mansfield. What a complex and brilliant woman! Claire Harman takes you on a journey through Mansfield's life interwoven with the evolution of the artist as a writer. Mansfield beautiful descriptive style, at times, haunting and jarring, evokes a sense of New Zealand for me. The light and shade of our island home. Anyone else who has lived in the hills of Wellington might also feel that same sense of connection. I look forward to reading more of Mansfield's work, with a new perspective on her personal journey and how this influenced her writing innovations.

[Giovanna Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had read Mansfield when I was younger, and didn't quite 'get' her. After reading Harman's book I'm looking forward to re-reading and finding some new stories.
I enjoyed the layout - the focus on one of the short stories and what was happening in Mansfield's life at the time. Harman painted a picture of Mansfield's life, just enough, not too much detail. Sparse but just right. I also learnt a lot about Mansfield that I didn't realise, and an insight into her family situation as well as the impact of WW1. Again, something I didn't quite understand when I was in my teens/early 20's.

[Zareen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katherine Mansfield (14 October1888-9 January 1923). In Wellington NewZeeland she died in France.n

Claire Hanson examines Katherine Mansfield’s stories in relation to her life relates her relationship to her contemporary writers & artists.

[Imogen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I did enjoy it and learning about what a fly af gal Katherine was. But also it would say something like 'and we know from her diary that Katherine had faked an orgasm the night before' and that does feel intrusive/excessive - not helping to understand her stories/life! But also...lol

[Dan Sotirios Kostopulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this bio of Mansfield. For the first time I felt that I really understood what she was trying to do in her work and gained a lot of perspective for her life and fiction. Such a brave and uncompromising figure.

[Helen Cummings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a lovely read. Read in tandem with Wild Places Selected Stories which provided an excellent reading experience of Katherine Mansfield’s life and her many short stories

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enrapturing book about an enrapturing talent, gone too soon.

[Pam Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having visited the Katherine Mansfield childhood home in NZ, much of her story was familiar but it was an informative read about a creative writer.

[Rebecca Sloane]

I thought this biography was unusual because the work was front and centre. I really enjoyed it.

[Mary Isaac · Rating 4 out of 5]

52 book club 2025 #44 A celebrity on the cover

[Emmapettitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to read, I enjoyed the format of chapters aroubd a story, with her life woven in.

[Jacob biscuits · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really charming. I already was obsessed with Mansfield and reading this made me fall in love with her and her writing all over again. Slay!