This selection of Katherine Mansfield's correspondence - from her first schoolgirl exchanges of 1903 to the last letters from the Gurdjieff Institute of Fontainebleau 20 years later - conveys her vivid and restless personality throughout a life that has become almost legendary for its vivacity and courage. It presents the voice of a new kind of 20th-century woman, in an erratic but determined movement towards self-definition. The selection draws from the five volumes of Mansfield's Collected Letters, and covers the range of her epistolary styles. Many of the letters are to John Middleton Murry, a moving record of what she called that utterly intense love; others are to such friends as Lady Ottoline Morrell and S.S.Koteliansky, the painters Anne Estelle Drey and Dorothy Brett, her own family, literary friends and chance acquaintances.