SOURCE: Rubin, Merle. “Troubled Lives of Two Gifted Women Writers.” Christian Science Monitor (25 May 1988): 20.

In the following review, Rubin compares and contrasts Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life with Marion Meade's biography, Dorothy Parker.

An accident of publication dates has connected two women writers, both famous in the 1920s, both highly esteemed as practitioners of their craft, both personally unhappy and self-destructive. Each came from a provincial background to a great metropolis—one from New Zealand to the London of Bloomsbury and D. H. Lawrence, the other from the wilds of New Jersey to the Manhattan of the Algonquin Round Table. Both drifted from affair to affair, from marriage to marriage, all of this taking a terrible toll in terms of health, spirit, and self-esteem.

Apart from the almost simultaneous appearance of these two biographies [Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life and Dorothy Parker], one would not normally think of...