Katherine Mansfield had a recurrent fear of loneliness: not only external loneliness, being cut off from other human beings and nature at large, but also inner loneliness, being cut off from herself, from that innermost dimension that she strove to reach with all her strength. The opposite of loneliness is relatedness, which is what her discovery of M. B. Oxon's Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego (1921) helped her achieve, according to the vibrant words she wrote on 4 January 1922:

This cryptic passage is an apt description for a book that remains no less cryptic despite almost a century of Mansfield criticism. Although Cosmic Anatomy is at the core of the Mansfield myth, few scholars have attempted either to contextualize it within the cultural scenario that saw the development of modernism or to scrutinize it more closely.

In order to understand Mansfield's response to this book we need to take into account a complex network of interpersonal exchanges that spans the divide between the intellectual and the emotional, science and pseudoscience, rationality and its ‘others’. It was Mansfield's old friend and mentor, A. R. Orage – a socialist thinker who had developed an interest in theosophy, and who edited the New Age between 1907 and 1922 – who sent the recently published Cosmic Anatomy to J. M. Murry, hoping to have it reviewed, but Murry ‘intensely disliked this “book of occult doctrines”’ and it was Mansfield who started reading it.