Katherine Mansfield's death did not follow a period of heightened intensity in her relationship with Murry, rather the contrary. Her last year displayed yet another cycle, similar to those in the past, of closeness, misunderstanding, disappointment and separation. Even during the relatively peaceful and productive months alone together at the Chalet, there had been signs of difficulty, which Murry did not completely perceive. On 7 September 1921, two days after he had sent The Things We Are to his publishers, Mansfield wrote to Ida Baker requesting that she take on the job of managing the household again, realising that she could not handle both ‘housekeeping’ and her writing. She asked her to ‘accept this situation as the outcome of our friendship’, which she considered ‘every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage’ (KMCL 4: 277). By late October, she would describe Ida Baker as ‘the official wife of both of us’ (KMCL 4: 303).

Mansfield's reference to the ‘sacred and eternal’ nature of friendship bears so much Lawrentian weight that it again reveals how much Women in Love had invaded her consciousness that past summer, and the loss of Murry's closeness to Lawrence underlies her concern over his isolation with her at the Chalet, as is evident in her letter to Sydney Schiff on 25 December 1921, where she mentions that he ‘craves friends’, but men he knows are too ‘frightened … to ever show him more than a kind of head sympathy’.