I found Katherine Mansfield in the archives, and it was through Persephone Books, named for a chthonic goddess, that I came to her swansong works – those stories written in Switzerland in the months before her death. As I train to become a librarian at Newnham College, Cambridge, my first task has been to catalogue, classify and exhibit a Persephone collection that was donated to the college library. Encountering the stories in this context, I was intrigued by the Publisher's Note in The Montana Stories, and particularly the editorial admission that

It struck me as brazen to go so explicitly against the author's imagined wishes. Posthumous publications tend towards eulogy in their introductions and often bury all trace of editorial interference in an effort to preserve the author's reputation. The ordering of the text within a posthumous collection is usually presented as the gathered but untouched remains of the writer's work, a mausoleum of their final words. The Montana Stories marks a bold addition to Mansfield's afterlife – it favours the archive over the art and takes its order from all that is extant, rather than what the writer herself might have deemed worthy.

I liked the editorial intervention. Having spent years studying the beauty in things, I was now being trained to see how that beauty was stored, learning the housekeeping behind the party and the technical legwork behind cultural heritage. Chronological order aims to leave nothing out but this particular hubris of the archive meets its downfall at the end of a well-stocked shelf; space is limited, even if time is not.

For institutions that aim to conserve and chronicle, libraries often display an astonishing lack of foresight. The classification system at Newnham, for example, has one number – 673 – assigned to English novels of the twentieth century.