SOURCE: Partridge, Frances. “A Short Life and a Restless One.” Spectator 259, no. 8311 (31 October 1987): 34.

In the following review, Partridge commends the veracity of Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, but concludes that Tomalin's cool, objective tone stands in stark contrast to Mansfield's frenetic life.

There is a particular pleasure in discovering from his biographer that an artist's character has the same flavour as his work. Turgenev comes to mind. The opposite state of affairs—a wide discrepancy between the two—is less common. One thinks of Wagner, and I wonder if Katherine Mansfield also qualifies. Her rather small output has, rightly in my view, kept its popularity; but the human being who emerges from this last and most careful of her biographies is striking rather than attractive, nor can this be put down to her dreadful struggles against disease, for if anything her character mellowed under suffering, as a pear...