In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves - to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I write with acid'. This book explores Mansfield's idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.

'I Live to Write' The Little Colonial: 1888-1908 A Born Actress and Mimic: August 1908 to November 1911 The Tiger: December 1911 to October 1915 Mansfield and Modernism: November 1915 to December 1918 The Secret Self: January 1919 to January 1923

ANGELA SMITH is Senior Lecturer in English Studies and Director of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies at the Universe of Sterling. She has taught at universities in California, Wales and Malawi. Her books include East African Writing in English, (ed) Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea, and Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two.