In June 1920, Katherine Mansfield set down her most developed exposition of what she understood by modern short fiction in a review for The Athenaeum titled ‘Wanted, a New Word’. Clare Hanson has described this as ‘virtually the only “manifesto” KM produced for the kind of fiction she herself wrote’. When Murry later collected this review in Novels and Novelists (1930), however, he erroneously gave it the title ‘Wanted, a New World’, which was then subsequently used in Hanson's edition of The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (1987) and in B. J. Kirkpatrick's A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (1989). This slippage not only calls attention to the mutability of Mansfield's writing as it passed through different textual transmissions, encouraging us to return to the original sites of publication in periodicals and magazines, but also suggests a direct correlation between her ideas of modernist formal experimentation and a geographical imaginary of discovery.

Indeed, after the death of her brother in October 1915, when Mansfield travelled to the south of France, she made a series of famous notebook entries linking her commitment to finding a new ‘form’ with making the ‘undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world’. The ‘form that I would choose has changed utterly’, she wrote, addressing her brother; ‘I feel no longer concerned with the same appearance of things’:

Mansfield instinctively reaches for a spatial vocabulary of empire when thinking about writing and language here, positioning herself as a New Zealander narrating the colonial nation (the ‘new world’) within the context of the European ‘old world’.