Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfield in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. She shows how, writing at a time when the First World War and changing attitudes to empire problematized boundaries and definitions of foreignness, both Mansfield and Woolf demonstrate moments of disorienting suspension where the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.