All Sorts of Lives

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** The Sunday Times Best Literary Book of 2023**
** A Waterstones Best Book of 2023**

‘All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield’s life and work’ A.L. KENNEDY

Restless outsider, masher-up of form and convention, Katherine Mansfield’s career was short but dazzling. She was the only writer Virginia Woolf admitted being jealous of, yet by the 1950s was so undervalued that Elizabeth Bowen was moved to ask, ‘Where is she – our missing contemporary?’

In this inventive and intimate study, Claire Harman takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s life and achievements, through the form she did so much to revolutionise: the short story. Exploring ten pivotal works, we watch how Mansfield’s desire to grow as a writer pushed her art into unknown territory, and how illness sharpened her extraordinary vitality: ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small.’

‘What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity… Brilliant’ Sunday Times

‘A searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand’ Sunjeev SahotaAll Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield’s life and work. This is great as an introduction to an unjustly neglected author and a joy for those of us who already love her writing—

In this sensitive and comprehensive biography, Claire Harman uncovers some steamy new details about Mansfield’s bisexuality, but doesn’t let the life distract from the blisteringly intense stories—The Times, *Books of the Year*

What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity – and that’s before you start on Mansfield as a leading modernist . . . It’s hard to imagine a more compelling advocate for Mansfield’s fiction, or a better introduction to it . . . brilliant —Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

A wonderful book to mark the centenary of Mansfield’s death . . . [her] clever insistence on placing the life and work side by side allows her to give brief but powerful accounts of Mansfield’s relations with other writers—Ruth Scurr, Spectator

Harman combines literary criticism with uncovering the life of the influential modernist writer, via chapters linked to individual short stories. The best literary biographies make you want to go back to the subject’s work with renewed passion, and Harman more than succeeds. In fact, her enthusiasm goes some way into bringing Mansfield’s own vitality to the page—Independent, Books of the Year

A kind of masterclass on the short story, taking the ideal practitioner as its focus . . . a valuable reminder of why – a hundred years after her death – we should still be reading and marvelling at Katherine Mansfield’s stories—Sarah Watling, Daily Telegraph

A worthy addition to the corpus of Mansfield interpretation . . . Like all the best writer biographies, All Sorts of Lives makes you reach again for the works—Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

Step aside, Virginia Woolf – it was Katherine Mansfield who ushered in the modern age —Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph

An excellent, sensitively written introduction—Miranda Seymour, The Times

An engaging, perceptive critical work, that is inseparable from the rich expanse of Mansfield biography. What the book so insists on, and so compellingly brings home, is Mansfield’s utter commitment to the demands of writing—Vincent O’Sullivan, Newsroom

What a searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand, it achieves a beautiful synthesis between Mansfield’s stories, her life and our apprehension of both these things—Sunjeev Sahota

Sensitive and comprehensive—Susie Goldsbrough, The Times

Harman’s book does that thing that all good literary biographies do. It sends us straight back into the delicate, exhilarating, risking world of Mansfield’s fiction—Kirsty Gunn, The Times Literary Supplement

[A] lucent biography—Tablet

This biography, graced by Harman’s deep understanding as a reader, allows the work and the life to unfold side by side, a pairing designed for maximum impact… puts art – the beating heart of a writer’s life – centre stage—Lyndall Gordon, New StatesmanClaire Harman is an award-winning writer and critic. Her books include biographies of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charlotte Brontë, as well as the bestselling Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World and Murder by the Book: A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime. She is a prizewinning poet and short-story writer and has been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016. She lives in Oxford.GB

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