SOURCE: Rifkind, Donna. “Live Fast, Die Young.” American Scholar 57 (autumn 1988): 628-32.

In the following review of Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, Rifkind provides a summary of Mansfield's life and finds shortcomings in Tomalin's feminist perspective and overestimation of Mansfield's artistic commitment.

Katherine Mansfield's brief literary career yielded only a collection of short stories, some letters, and a private journal, yet her position in the pantheon of English letters is surprisingly solid. Many critics have in fact considered that position to be unjustifiable. Mansfield's friend D. H. Lawrence insisted “she was not a great genius. She had a charming gift, and a finely cultivated one. But not more.” George Orwell was less generous, maintaining that her short fiction followed the formula of “a pointless little sketch about fundamentally uninteresting people, written in short flat sentences and ending on a vague query.” Mansfield herself once complained, “I am tired of...