This report will examine how the life and work of New Zealand's most iconic dead writer, Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), is reflected in the critical writing and fiction of C. K. Stead, New Zealand's most eminent living writer, with a career spanning more than 50 years. Stead set his novel Mansfield during the three years spanning 1915 to 1918, the period when Mansfield connected with members of the Bloomsbury group for the first time, found her true voice as an author and was still in ‘reasonably good health’; it was, as he points out, ‘the time of her most intense engagement with an extraordinary cast of characters on the English literary scene’. This essay will also consider two poems by Stead: ‘Jealousy I’ and ‘Jealousy II’, based on episodes in Mansfield's life. The three tables which accompany this essay provide examples of how Stead uses Mansfield's writing to construct his novel and that of Woolf and Mansfield to construct the two poems above.

In 1972, thirty-two years prior to the publication of this novel, Stead became the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship, offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at the Villa Isola Bella in Menton, once the home of Mansfield. Stead was the third Fellow, following Owen Leeming in 1970 and Margaret Scott in 1971. During the eight months he spent in the South of France on this visit, Stead took the opportunity of rereading all the Mansfield primary texts published at that time, which led directly to the publication of the Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield: A Selection in 1977. And Stead's immersion in all things Mansfield as a consequence of his Fellowship would reverberate through the rest of his life; his fascination, fostered on this trip, would lead not only to his critical volume on the letters and journal, but also to other more personally creative endeavours such as poems and ultimately to the novel, Mansfield. As Stead points out: ‘Mansfield has remained an important part of my intellectual furniture – otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to write the novel’.