Katherine Mansfield

Born and brought up on a hill farm in the north of England, Kathleen Jones read law and then English Literature at university before specialising in early women writers - work that culminated in A Glorious Fame, the life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She spent several years in Africa and the Middle East - where she worked in English broadcasting - before returning home. Her published work includes radio journalism, articles for magazines and newspapers, short fiction and eleven books - a mixture of biography, general non-fiction and poetry. Her biographies include:- A Passionate Sisterhood (Virago) - an account of the lives of the women who lived with the 'lake poets', which Sue Limb described as 'a fascinating, marvellous, utterly absorbing book . . . the stuff your English teacher never told you.': Learning not to be First, a life of the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (OUP) which was Doris Lessing's 'book of the year', and a biography of Catherine Cookson (Time Warner). Kathleen lives in Cumbria where she writes full time. She has taught creative writing in a number of colleges and universities and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lancaster University. Further information at: www.kathleenjones.co.uk

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I-Leaving All Fair, 1 Fontainebleau, 2 The Husband's Story, 3 Ida's Story; Part II-Wanted: A New World, 4 'The Wizard London', 5 Freedom and Experience, 6 The Lost Child, 7 Coming of Age in Bavaria, 8 In Search of Katherine Mansfield, 9 'The Model Boys-will-be-boys Pseudo Intellectual Magazine'; Part III-The Two Katherines, 10 Violet, 11 The Failure of Love; Part IV, 12 Tig and Wig, 13 Rananim, 14 Prelude, 15 The 'Blooms Berries'; Part V-Betty, 16 In Limbo, 17 'The Last Hell'; Part IV-The Dark Katherine, 18 Facing Oblivion, 19 At the Bottom of the Sea, 20 The Perfect Friend, 21 'A Writer First and a Woman After'; Part VII-A Religion of Love, 22 Keeping Faith; Part VIII-'The Levantine Psychic Shark', 23 The Soul's Desperate Choice, 24 'A Child of the Sun'; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index.

What [emerges] with indisputable clarity from Jones's skilful use of her sources is a portrait of Mansfield, stylish and febrile, cigarette in one hand, pen in the other, relishing life, scrutinising it with her keen intelligence, and recording her perceptions in a voice that continues to unsettle and surprise.