The works of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), one of England's most gifted short story writers, have influenced over eight decades of writers. A friend to Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell, Mansfield left a literary legacy collected in The Garden Party , In a German Pension , and numerous anthologies. Biographies appearing after her death idealized her, but Meyers sets the record straight in his assessment of the author's life and career, revealing a woman with a self-destructive disdain for convention and respectability. Born and raised in New Zealand, Mansfield threw herself into several love affairs with men and women before living with literary critic John Middleton Murray. Meyers chronicles their tempestuous relationship (one that mixed abuse with devotion) and the years she fought a losing battle with tuberculosis. Mansfield's short, unhappy life is dissected in this 1978 title. Meyers, whose biographies tend to focus on his subject's shortcomings, has a field day with Mansfield, whose life seemed to be one long string of failed friendships, doomed affairs, and other heartbreaks. Throughout it all, however, she managed to focus on her writing and produce some very good material before her untimely death from tuberculosis at age 34. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Rich in minor portraits of the 'underworld' where talent abounded…. Meyers is especially lively and penetrating on Mansfield's changing relations with [D. H. and Frieda] Lawrence and the well-known outbursts of Lawrence's rages and returns to affection. -- V. S. Pritchett ― The New Yorker The chief strength of Dr. Meyers's valuable book… is the panoramic view that he takes of literary history. ― The Sunday Telegraph Jeffrey Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the author of Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography , Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy , Joseph Conrad: A Biography , Hemingway: Life into Art , and Gary Cooper: An American Hero , (all available from Cooper Square Press), in addition to biographies of Humphrey Bogart, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, and George Orwell. He lives in Berkeley, California.