All Sorts of Lives

All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and fascinating exploration of Mansfield’s life and work. This is great as an introduction to an unjustly neglected author and a joy for those of us who already love her writingIn this sensitive and comprehensive biography, Claire Harman uncovers some steamy new details about Mansfield’s bisexuality, but doesn’t let the life distract from the blisteringly intense stories * The Times, Books of the Year *What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness and sex and celebrity - and that’s before you start on Mansfield as a leading modernist … It’s hard to imagine a more compelling advocate for Mansfield’s fiction, or a better introduction to it … brilliant – Claire Lowdon * Sunday Times *A wonderful book to mark the centenary of Mansfield’s death … [her] clever insistence on placing the life and work side by side allows her to give brief but powerful accounts of Mansfield’s relations with other writers – Ruth Scurr * Spectator *Harman combines literary criticism with uncovering the life of the influential modernist writer, via chapters linked to individual short stories. The best literary biographies make you want to go back to the subject’s work with renewed passion, and Harman more than succeeds. In fact, her enthusiasm goes some way into bringing Mansfield’s own vitality to the page * Independent, Books of the Year *A kind of masterclass on the short story, taking the ideal practitioner as its focus … a valuable reminder of why - a hundred years after her death - we should still be reading and marvelling at Katherine Mansfield’s stories – Sarah Watling * Daily Telegraph *A worthy addition to the corpus of Mansfield interpretation … Like all the best writer biographies, All Sorts of Lives makes you reach again for the works – Catherine Taylor * Financial Times *Step aside, Virginia Woolf - it was Katherine Mansfield who ushered in the modern age – Frances Wilson * Daily Telegraph *An excellent, sensitively written introduction – Miranda Seymour * The Times *An engaging, perceptive critical work, that is inseparable from the rich expanse of Mansfield biography. What the book so insists on, and so compellingly brings home, is Mansfield’s utter commitment to the demands of writing – Vincent O’Sullivan * Newsroom *What a searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to read and connect and understand, it achieves a beautiful synthesis between Mansfield’s stories, her life and our apprehension of both these things – Sunjeev SahotaSensitive and comprehensive – Susie Goldsbrough * The Times *Harman’s book does that thing that all good literary biographies do. It sends us straight back into the delicate, exhilarating, risking world of Mansfield’s fiction – Kirsty Gunn * The Times Literary Supplement *[A] lucent biography * Tablet *This biography, graced by Harman’s deep understanding as a reader, allows the work and the life to unfold side by side, a pairing designed for maximum impact… puts art - the beating heart of a writer’s life - centre stage – Lyndall Gordon * New Statesman *

Claire Harman is an award-winning writer and critic. Her books include biographies of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charlotte Bronte, as well as the bestselling Jane’s Fame- How Jane Austen Conquered the World and Murder by the Book- A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime. She is a prizewinning poet and short-story writer and has been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016. She lives in Oxford.