The rush to tell the story of Katherine Mansfield’s short, fascinating life began as soon as she died. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, a gifted editor, notoriously turned the publication of her writing into an industry. Even at the time, people took issue with his efforts, which included publishing misleading versions of her journals and letters. Sylvia Lynd accused him of ‘boiling Katherine’s bones to make soup’. D H Lawrence claimed Murry ‘made capital out of her death’. The spectre of an extractive relationship hangs over all biographies, but particularly so with Mansfield’s life, which was cut short by tuberculosis when her powers as a short-story writer were at their peak, then shaped by a man intent on hiding what didn’t suit him. Both Claire Tomalin in her 1987 biography and now Gerri Kimber object to Murry’s portrayal of Mansfield as a saintly figure. She was dazzling, witty, racy and sometimes cruel. 

Such misunderstandings are a scholar’s bread and butter: an opportunity to correct the record and show more understanding than previous readers. Perhaps nobody since Murry has done more for Mansfield than Kimber, whose prodigious scholarship (often in collaboration with others) has given us Mansfield’s letters and poems as well as unedited versions of the collected fiction and of archival discoveries that tell us more about her sexuality and relationships. In 2016 she published an account of Mansfield’s early life; now we have this full, studious biography, whose claims rest on complexity and nuance, on hidden facts over rumour. 

As Kimber points out, however, Mansfield was a champion dissembler. And her life was the stuff of stories. Born into a prosperous New Zealand family, she was a self-styled bohemian who sought adventure away from bourgeois norms, a ‘restless soul’ in her own words, with ‘a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse’. ‘I am so keen upon all women having a definite future,’ she wrote in 1906. ‘The idea of sitting still and waiting for a husband is absolutely revolting.’ Once in London she instead impulsively married twice and travelled across Europe, from the bals musette of Paris to the battlefields of Germany and the domestic battleground that was communal living with the Lawrences in Cornwall. She had lots of sex, suffered a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy, and contracted a venereal disease that would have long-term effects on her health. She drew people into her life and pushed them away, sometimes manipulating the truth and in the process creating what Kimber calls ‘a tangled web’.

Untangling things, Kimber offers compelling new detail about Mansfield’s first marriage, to the singer George Bowden, whom she met in 1909 while pregnant with another man’s child. It has always been understood as a marriage of convenience: grimly loveless perhaps (Mansfield wore black to the ceremony) and extremely brief (she didn’t show up to Bowden’s flat that night), but an ‘intellectual comradeship’, at least in Bowden’s view. Recently unearthed divorce papers tell a different tale: in Bowden’s affidavit he says they did live together after the marriage, but that Mansfield was adulterous, driven by a rapacious sexuality that he could not satisfy. It’s just the sort of misogynist caricature that makes a biographer wary, sending them in search of the more complex truth. Mansfield’s response to the affidavit is not known, but in the case of her second marriage, to Murry, Kimber goes beneath the happy facade that Mansfield kept up in letters and Murry promoted after her death. It emerges just how betrayed she felt by his constant insensitivities (work and other women often kept him away), and how lonely her life was in the years of her chronic ill health. 

The big claim of the book is that Mansfield had a serious intimate relationship with A R Orage, editor of the New Age and a crucial supporter of her writing. Whereas Tomalin saw Orage as a mentor and friend – a ‘master’, as Mansfield called him at the end of her life – Kimber is convinced there was a sexual as well as creative communion between them in the years 1910 to 1911. Orage emerges as Mansfield’s road not taken, the true love of her life and the most substantial thing that she hid.

For a biography concerned with the facts buried beneath old stories, some of the evidence for such a deep affair seems thin: a sexually explicit diary entry about an anonymous ‘Man’, a secret poem inscribed in a book that may have been meant for Orage. Other suggested proofs run counter to Kimber’s revisionist – and feminist – aims: ‘given Mansfield’s promiscuity at this time’, their physical relationship is ‘not a difficult scenario to imagine’. 

Kimber is not the only one imagining it. The work of another scholar, retired lawyer John Wood, established this new narrative about Mansfield’s romantic life. (He also found those divorce papers in the National Archives.) Kimber credits him fully and extensively cites from his unpublished notes throughout the book, implicitly creating a biographical collaboration that makes plain the process of digging for proof, speculating and piecing a story together. 

I longed for this biography to be steered more by narrative, to get closer to how Mansfield felt. Her loneliness, sense of betrayal, recklessness and deceptions are reported but never interpreted. And how did all those feelings and behaviours – her world view – shape her writing? There is plenty about her fiction, on which Kimber is one of our foremost experts – about Mansfield’s ‘pictorial’ techniques and her signature use of free indirect style. There is also plenty about how Mansfield turned the facts of her life into fiction. But the more mysterious, uneven ways that art and life coincide are less explored. How did Mansfield’s isolation and longing for the companion she did not find in Murry shape, for example, the existentialism of a story like ‘Life of Ma Parker’? Did her ‘hidden life’ inform her impulse to hide ugliness, as a bourgeois family does poverty and death in ‘The Garden Party’? All Mansfield’s stories, says Kimber, concern ‘love and/or money’. As she makes clear, these were constant preoccupations of Mansfield’s life too, but the question of how this anxiety registers in her writing is not pursued.

Perhaps, in the shadow of so many stories told about Mansfield, Kimber did not want to risk any falsehoods. Mansfield herself, by contrast, was dedicated to a mix of truth and artifice. ‘I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s real familiar life,’ she told one correspondent in 1922, a year before she died. Mansfield spent her last few months in Fontainebleau, studying (along with Orage) under the mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Long attracted to spiritualism, in her dying days she was still restlessly seeking meaning – another story – to give shape to her life.