SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Going Every Sort of Hog.” New York Review of Books 35, no. 4 (17 March 1988): 28-9.

In the following positive review, Annan argues that it is “hard to find fault” with Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life.

Katherine Mansfield's contemporaries, including, though reluctantly, Virginia Woolf agreed that she was brilliant. Woolf, admired her besides for going “every sort of hog,” while she herself remained regretfully respectable. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mansfield is that she managed to construct for herself, a century or at least half a century too late, a classically Romantic career. Born in 1888 into a prosperous New Zealand family and educated for three years at Queen's College, Harley Street, an enlightened London girls' school, she rejected her background, comforts and all, to starve in a succession of European attics and unheatable cottages, to combine a hectic love life with dedication to her work, to make...