Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf A Public of To [Hardcover]

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness, the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.

Smith writes persuasively and well about these correspondences [between Mansfield and Woolf], about the influence of Post-Impressionism on both writers, and about their shared interest in the cinema, a developing art form which suddenly challenged the old linear conventions of fiction by offering unparalleled possibilities of narrative immediacy. --Times Literary Supplement