Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction letters and diaries Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange the domestic made menacing.