SOURCE: McLaughlin, Anne L. “Out of the Milk Jug.” Belles Lettres 4, no. 1 (fall 1988): 17, 19.

In the following review, McLaughlin compliments Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, but regrets Tomalin's failure to fully examine the implications of Mansfield's illness on her psychological perspective and work.

Katherine Mansfield, who virtually created the modern short story in English, once wrote that she felt “like a fly who has been dropped into the milk jug.” After her death in 1923 at the age of thirty-four, Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, dropped her reputation into a milk jug of sentimentality through his criticism and editing of her work. In the last eight years, three major biographies have struggled to fish Mansfield's reputation out. The most recent, Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, presents this elusive life story with a compassion and clarity that avoids the milk jug entirely.

Building on earlier biographies by Antony Alpers...