'Hundreds of selves': the British Library's Katherine Mansfield letters

IN January 1920, Katherine Mansfield 'escaped' (as she declared in a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry) from the 'hell of isolation . . . the loneliness and fright' of the past few months, which had been spent at Ospedaletti on the Italian Riviera. She was ill with tuberculosis, and her doctors had advised against another English winter. Alone with her ever-faithful companion, Ida Baker - on whom she was forced to depend completely, but who provoked in her an irritation which occasionally exploded into hatred - she found herself leading the dull, restricted life of an invalid.