'Few publications have declared, with such vigour or such clarity, that rather remarkable rise in Katherine Mansfield's reputation over the last two decades, her moving from her slot as minor writer to a central role in Modernism, as does this fresh collection of essays by younger scholars. 'The most emblematic woman writer of her time,' the New York Times Book Review has called her. These essays take up the challenge to ask why and how this is so, as they read her with flair and depth against the literary and philosophical currents where she now takes her place. We can no longer consider twentieth-century writing without Mansfield among its key figures, her fiction and letters among its enduring texts.'