As we have seen, the question of Mansfield's impersonations is not just a literary question and is not restricted to her fictions. Impersonation was important in Mansfield's life as well as being critical to her writing: impersonation for Mansfield was partly a condition of being a writer and partly a condition of being. On at least one occasion in her letters and notebooks – a rich source of speculation on writing and on the nature of the writer's work – Mansfield represents the ‘double life’ of the writer as what she calls a ‘queer state’, queer because of the way that the writer is detached from life, depersonalized. ‘I feel in my heart as though I have died – as far as personal life goes,’ she writes to Dorothy Brett in December 1918: ‘I am a writer who cares for nothing but writing – thats how I feel. When I am with people I feel like a doctor with his patients – very sympathetic […] but as regards myself – quite alone – quite isolated – a queer state’ (CLKM ii. 296). The problem of this double life, of the detachment of the writer from her own life, is also a problem, not least, of gender. In two letters written in 1919, Mansfield tried to explain to Murry her sense of the splitting-apart of the writer and the woman. ‘I live withdrawn from my personal life’, she remarks in a letter dated 12 December: ‘I am a writer first.’ And she contrasts her present state with that of the past, when she worked less and when ‘my writing self was merged in my personal self’ (CLKM iv. 149). A few days earlier, on 3 December 1919, Mansfield had linked this sense of authorship with her relationship with Murry and more generally with the question of gender and sexuality. She tells Murry that she is unable to ‘give’ him ‘all ’ that he wants: ‘Im a writer first & a woman after’,

she says (CLKM iv. 133). The comment highlights a central problem in Mansfield's writing and in her life, its ‘queer state’, one that she struggled with throughout her life and that she never reconciled. It is a problem that involves the queerness not just of her relationship with Murry but of her sense of herself as a writer and the complex interactions between writing, gender, and sexuality.