In October 1922, only months before her death and after years of chronic illness, years of fruitless and sometimes cranky medical treatment, years of physical pain, and years of what amounts to denial – denial of the seriousness of her condition and of her prospects for a long life – Mansfield wrote to her friend S. S. Koteliansky (‘Kot’) of her decision to stop seeking medical treatment and instead to retreat to George Gurdjieff 's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. In this letter, as in others written at around this time, Mansfield expresses her belief that she is breaking with the past and making a new beginning. She writes of her sense of having lived a double life, of being ‘superficial ’ not only in relation to others but also in relation to herself, and of her sense that, as she writes to Kot, ‘I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me’ (LKM ii. 260). In a letter to Murry written two days later, she returns to the theme and to her ‘secret sorrow’ that she has ‘always been’, in the ‘deepest sense’, ‘disunited’ (LKM ii. 261).

While Mansfield presents this as a new awakening, a new perception of her spiritual state, in fact from the start of her writing life her writing and her life were built on and built around such a ‘secret disruption’ – around a sense of the fragility, the mobility, and the multiplicity of personal identity. Highly conscious of personality as a mask, role, or performance, Mansfield inscribes this sense of the constructedness of the self, of personal identity, in her published and unpublished prose. According to her long-term friend and companion Ida Baker, Mansfield was a ‘born actress and mimic’, and critics have long recognized that the key to Mansfield's life as well as to her literary achievement is a certain strategy of impersonation. Brigid Brophy comments, for example, that Mansfield's ‘obvious – indeed, dazzling – talent is for multiple impersonation’ (CR 90), and Sydney Kaplan remarks that Mansfield's narrative poetics are ‘grounded in a precocious recognition of the self as many selves’. One of the simplest ways in which Mansfield articulated a sense of fracturing and multiplicity in her personality was by naming and renaming herself.