[In the following review, McLaughlin compliments Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, but regrets Tomalin's failure to fully examine the implications of Mansfield's illness on her psychological perspective and work.]

Katherine Mansfield, who virtually created the modern short story in English, once wrote that she felt “like a fly who has been dropped into the milk jug.” After her death in 1923 at the age of thirty-four, Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, dropped her reputation into a milk jug of sentimentality through his criticism and editing of her work. In the last eight years, three major biographies have struggled to fish Mansfield's reputation out. The most recent, Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, presents this elusive life story with a compassion and clarity that avoids the milk jug entirely.

Building on earlier biographies by Antony Alpers and Jeffrey Meyers, Tomalin describes Mansfield's New Zealand childhood; her father, a self-made banker; her mother, an aloof hypochondriac; and the matriarchal household in which she grew up as a fat, bespectacled, third daughter with three sisters and a brother. Feeling trapped in colonial Wellington, Mansfield persuaded her father to allow her to sail for London before her twentieth birthday. In 1908, London was full of radical social change, which Mansfield embodied heroically, as Tomalin points out. She became pregnant by one man, married another, left him the first night, and went to Bavaria to have an illegitimate child. She miscarried, wrote a series of stories, and had an affair with Floryan Sobieniowski, a Polish writer.

Here Tomalin contributes new and important material to Mansfield's story. Using medical records and interviews, she presents evidence that Mansfield contracted gonorrhoea from Sobieniowski, a disease that afflicted her with gonorrheal arthritis and made her particularly susceptible to tuberculosis. Tomalin believes that Sobieniowski knew that Mansfield had freely adapted a Chekhov story and had published it as her own, since he blackmailed her years later. Tomalin sees this affair as the start of a terrible chain of events for Mansfield, as a curse that shadowed the rest of her life.

Mansfield returned to London, where she began to publish her stories and met John Middleton Murry, the young critic and editor, who became her boarder, her lover, and finally her husband in 1918. By then the couple were frequently separated, for Mansfield was seriously ill with tuberculosis and had embarked on a restless search for the perfect climate or cure—a search that took her finally to the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau, where she died.

Tomalin discusses the strong impressions Mansfield made on the works of such writer friends as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Woolf confessed that Mansfield's work was the only writing she had ever been jealous of and felt that “probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else.” Tomalin explains that although Murry was in love with a myth of Mansfield, she was equally in love with a myth of him; neither knew the other realistically, and neither could tolerate deviations from the myths they had devised. The domestic peace for which Mansfield longed kept eluding her: Murry was frequently remote, physically or psychically; they lived in a succession of temporary flats and houses; and Mansfield was unable to bear a child. The terrible waste that Mansfield's illness made of her talent is saddening, yet her enormous courage and commitment inspire.

Unfortunately, Tomalin does not speculate on the implications that her new biographical data may have for the interpretation of Mansfield's work and creative processes. Mansfield's gonorrhoea must have contributed to the themes of disgust with sex and child-bearing that move through many of her stories. Her preoccupation with the secret lives of her characters may well have been intensified by a guilty awareness of her hidden disease. That disease must have made her New Zealand childhood seem more remote than ever, convincing her that, despite her pangs of homesickness, she could never return. She must have known that the only way she could preserve and possess her early memories was to write them down. She did so with such an extraordinary combination of nostalgic tenderness and unsentimental clarity that “Prelude” and “At the Bay” remain two of the most beautiful stories of family life in English. The shame of Mansfield's early plagiarism might help to explain why her work lacks a cumulative quality and seems instead to leap forward, then to sag, then to leap again.

Despite the lack of discussion of the implications of Mansfield's gonorrhoea and plagiarism on her work, this is a remarkable biography. Tomalin has discovered vital new parts to this complex life and has pieced them together into a sympathetic, yet objective, whole. She has not only lifted Mansfield out of the milk jug of sentimentality, she has cleared the way for new readings of her stories and new thoughts about how they evolved.