Kevin Boon, From the Colonies to Katherine Mansfield: The Life and Times of Sir Harold Beauchamp (London: Olympia Publishers, 2021), 181 pp., £8.99. ISBN 9781788306249

Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, eds, Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020), 266 pp., £85. ISBN 9781350135505

Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber and Janet M. Wilson, eds, Special Issue on Katherine Mansfield, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 38: 2 (2020), 157 pp.

Alice Kelly, Commemorative Modernisms: Women Writers, Death and the First World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 297 pp., £85. ISBN 9781474459907

Todd Martin, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 534 pp., £130. ISBN 9781350111448

Anna Neima, The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society (London: Picador, 2021), 320 pp., £25. ISBN 9781529023077

Beverley Randell, ed., and Jenni Shoesmith, artist, Heart of Flame: Katherine Mansfield’s Flowers and Trees (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2020), 116 pp., $30 NZD. ISBN 9781990007163

In 1906 Katherine Mansfield wrote to a friend, ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people.’ Less than fifteen years later, her confidence in the multifaceted self appears to falter: one might be ‘True to oneself!’ but ‘Which self?’ This plurality and instability of ‘real’ and fictional selves challenges us; how can we fix the object of our readerly gaze when the object is in flux, like the fluid dynamism of a celestial body whose speed and location disorient us continually? The pleasures and problems of reading Katherine Mansfield’s writing are the changing horizon of her fiction. If the works under review here are any indication, recent scholarship has made significant inroads in charting Mansfield’s remarkable, multidirectional work.

The largest and perhaps most ambitious recent project is The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, edited by Todd Martin. At 534 pages, with twenty-six chapters and a selected annotated bibliography, this anthology offers a superb introduction to Katherine Mansfield that will be useful to students and scholars alike. Its broad compendium of critical approaches to, histories of and trends within Mansfield studies suggests further avenues for scholarly work.