Katherine Mansfield viewed her literary career through the prism of periodical publication. Written in the summer of 1921, the above draft of a letter composed in one of her notebooks provides a striking illustration of how Mansfield presented her credentials to others and assessed her reputation as a writer prior to the publication of her most successful short story collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, in that annus mirabilis of literary modernism, 1922. Comprising satirical sketches first printed in the political weekly The New Age, Mansfield's first short story collection, In a German Pension, was published at the end of 1911. It was another nine years before she published another book, with Bliss and Other Stories appearing in December 1920. In the intervening years, however, Mansfield was prolific in her output, contributing work to ‘little magazines’ such as Rhythm, The Blue Review and The Signature, to established periodicals such as The New Age and The Athenaeum, as well as making brief appearances in diverse publications such as T.P.'s Weekly, The Saturday Westminster Gazette, The Times Literary Supplement and The English Review. Before the publication of The Garden Party in 1922, therefore, it was as a contributor to magazines and periodicals on which Mansfield's reputation hinged; indeed, even with The Garden Party in circulation, Wyndham Lewis could still describe her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. Encompassing a dismissive attitude towards Mansfield's nationality as well as disdain for the kind of mass-market magazines for which she was beginning to write, Lewis's comment was certainly not meant as a compliment, but his pithy characterisation speaks volumes about how Mansfield was viewed by her contemporaries.