In one of the translations that Mansfield produced with Koteliansky for publication in The Athenaeum, Anton Chekhov notes: ‘The thought that I am writing for a weighty magazine, and that my little thing will be looked upon more seriously than it deserves, keeps on jerking my elbow, as the devil did the monk’. Whether writing for an established and ‘weighty’ literary journal such as The Athenaeum, an avant-garde little magazine such as Rhythm, or a periodical positioned somewhere between, such as The New Age, Mansfield's periodical contributions consistently bear out this observation that print contexts indelibly shape what a writer produces; that a writer's elbow will always feel the pull and the tug of the publication to which they are contributing. Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture has sought to demonstrate the extent to which Mansfield's writings are laden with meanings that will always remain hidden to the reader who isolates the text from the original print contexts of publication. In the relational model of creation sustained by periodicals and magazines, all contributions have the potential to condition the meanings of other contributions. Reading Mansfield's writings within these contexts therefore enables us to situate her work more resolutely as historically embedded within particular political, aesthetic and social debates, and as produced through networks of association with other writers and artists.

This approach to Mansfield's work positions her as an important female figure in the history of early twentieth-century periodical culture. Over recent years, the burgeoning field of feminist periodical studies has led to increasing attention being paid to the significant, formative role played by women writers and editors in the emergence of literary modernism. Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture enlarges this field of enquiry, highlighting the ways in which Mansfield's periodical contributions responded to the suffrage movement and articles about feminism in The New Age, for instance, and presented a gendered critique of other contributions to Rhythm. Similarly, this book highlights the crucial editorial role performed by Beatrice Hastings at The New Age, as well as Mansfield's own significance as an editor of Rhythm and The Blue Review.