Katherine Mansfield hated, with a passion. Her letters, journals and stories, give a powerful sense of her delight in hatred, that most intimate, most ‘personal’ of emotions. Mansfield was passionate in her hatreds and passionate about hate. Bertrand Russell, writing in 1949 to disclaim an affair with Mansfield, declared that he ‘admired her passionately, but was repelled by her dark hatreds’. ‘Hatred’, comments Claire Tomalin, ‘was her favourite emotion’ (SL 6); she had, Elizabeth Bowen remarks, ‘a terrifying capacity for contempt’. Mansfield's notebooks and letters often express her hatreds and include a number of reflections on the passion. ‘I hate everybody, loathe myself, loathe my Life,’ she declares decisively in an early notebook entry (KMN i. 101); ‘No, I hate society,’ in a later entry (KMN i. 282). ‘People are vile’, she tells Brett, ‘but Life is thrilling’ (CLKM ii. 170). But then later, as if her hatred is not hers, ‘I don't want to hate people: I want to love them’ (CLKM ii. 260). She even contemplates writing a story on the topic. ‘I'd like to write a long long story on this & call it “Last Words to Life”. One ought to write it, and another on the subject of HATE’ (KMN ii. 180). Occasionally she will simply expostulate on ‘her’ hatred in the abstract: ‘Oh, my hatred!’ she declares in one notebook (KMN ii. 295). But often it is more focused: ‘Oh how I loathe hotels,’ she tells Ottoline Morrell (CLKM ii. 192), and she writes to Murry on housework that ‘I hate hate HATE doing these things that you accept just as all men accept of their women’ (CLKM i. 125). On a personal level, it was for her companion Ida Baker (‘L.M.’) that, as her letters and notebooks make clear, Mansfield reserved her most virulent hatred: ‘shes a revolting hysterical ghoul,’ she writes of her friend in a characteristically hysterical outburst, ‘Shes never content except when she can eat me’ (CLKM ii. 68). ‘Its not the slightest use pretending I can stand people,’ she remarks in a letter to Murry, ‘I cant. I hate L.M. so utterly and detest her so that shes torture’ (CLKM ii. 109). ‘My love for her is so divided by my extreme hate for her’, she remarks later, ‘that I really think the latter has it ’ (CLKM ii. 190).