The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield

The correspondence of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry is a story in its own right, as compelling and poignant as any that Mansfield herself invented. Here, juxtaposed for the first time, are 300 letters exchanged between them during their extraordinary eleven-year relationship. The letters begin in January 1912, a month after their first meeting, when both were relative newcomers to the London literary scene; the last, a letter from Murry, was written four days before Katherine died, in Fontainebleau, in January 1923. The intervening years were ones of both feverish creativity and heartbreaking frustration; of intense closeness and unassailable distance; of shared idealism and, as Katherine's illness took its inexorable hold, of mutual recognition that the glittering partnership they'd once envisaged would be cut tragically short. Whether sparkling or witty, reflective or despairing, the letters have the immediacy of conversation and the candor of the very finest epistolary writing. They illustrate wonderfully the unique personal magnetism which has become part of the Mansfield legend, and indicate, too, that posterity has perhaps judged Murry more harshly than ever she did. As Katherine herself wrote: "I feel no other lovers have walked the earth more joyfully-in spite of all."

Please note this copy has fading on the spine, a small neat insciption on an inside page and some light scuffs on the edges of the covers.

ISBN: 9780091535001

Size: Hardciver, 394 pages

Publisher:  Hutchinson

Year: 1983