The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 3: Letters to John Middleton Murry 1912-1918

Volume 3 of the new authoritative edition of Katherine Mansfield’s complete correspondence

Provides accurate transcriptions that shed new light on the everyday, intimate world of Mansfield as a letter-writer

Presents all Mansfield’s letters to John Middleton Murry from 1912 to 1918, foregrounding their years of intellectual apprenticeship and the impact of war, political upheavals and ill-health on their social and cultural environment

Provides meticulous explanatory notes and rich contextual information

Offers extensive attention to the cultural and socio-political context of the correspondence

Unlike the first two volumes of this new edition of Katherine Mansfield’s letters, which encompassed a dazzling variety of correspondents, this third volume focuses exclusively on letters to John Middleton Murry, chronologically arranged, from the day when he first became her lodger in 1912 through to the week after the Armistice in November 1918, when they were newly married. It is no exaggeration to say that over the course of these six years, their entire world was turned upside down. By the time the volume closes, they are married but already increasingly estranged; they have both become professional writers but grapple with increasing economic precarity; Europe lies ravaged by war; and the devastating diagnosis of tuberculosis has been pronounced, not, ironically, for Murry whose fragile health had preoccupied them for two years, but for Mansfield herself. This volume of letters documents the whole spectrum of changes, against a vivid historical and socio-cultural backcloth and contains entirely new, insightful and extensive annotations. A second volume of letters between the pair completes the edition.