Despite her parents’ early efforts to shape her into a respectable Edwardian lady, Katherine Mansfield had a multiplicity of unconventional desires, many of which she unapologetically pursued throughout her short, secretive and provocative life. Still, in a 1906 teenage letter to her favourite cousin, Sylvia Payne, we see that Mansfield’s desire to determine her own destiny – and the futility of that desire – is potent:

Clearly, Mansfield saw traditional marriage and gender roles as obstacles to women creating their own fates and defining their futures. What is also evident in this letter is that Mansfield does not see an avenue for such ‘power over circumstances’ available to women, but she longs for it all the same.

Indeed, Mansfield’s constant condition in life was one of longing for more than the social expectations that were impressed upon women – such as heteronormative marriage and its generic domestic trappings. Her fervently desirous self is further evidenced in a 1915 letter that Mansfield wrote to her then lover, John Middleton Murry, whom she married in 1918:

The first sentence is direct and audacious. Mansfield’s own emphasis on the word ‘want’ makes it the focus of her letter, forcefully proclaiming that what follows in her note will be more about what she desires and, indeed, she does go on to list several items: to write, to have friends, to have a house.