There are two distinct periods in Katherine Mansfield's short writing life. The first covers the years from 1908 until 1917, during which time she moved from her native New Zealand to take up the bohemian life in London, got married, divorced, contracted gonorrhoea, got married again, published her first volume of short stories, the curiously satirical and commercially unsuccessful In A German Pension (1911) and suffered the loss of her beloved brother in the First World War. The second period runs from 1917 until her untimely death from tuberculosis in 1923, and although much the shorter, saw her compose all of the stories for which she is now revered and remembered. Within that period there are two events in particular that represent turning points in Mansfield's life and career: the first is her engagement with Anton Chekhov's short stories; the second is her accepting an invitation from Virginia Woolf to write a story for the newly established Hogarth Press.

The question of Mansfield's indebtedness to Chekhov has had a long and at times controversial history, not least because of the accusation, first levelled in 1935, that her story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ plagiarized Chekhov's ‘Sleepyhead’. Whatever the extent and nature of the debt in that particular story, Mansfield's critical observations, like Woolf's, reveal the importance of Chekhov's interrogative style to her developing sense of the form the short story might take.