Claire Harman is an award-winning writer and critic. Her books include biographies of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Fanny Burney, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charlotte Bronte, as well as the bestselling Jane's Fame- How Jane Austen Conquered the World and Murder by the Book- A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime. She is a prizewinning poet and short-story writer and has been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016. She lives in Oxford.
All Sorts of Lives is a beautiful, fastidiously researched and
fascinating exploration of Mansfield's life and work. This is great
as an introduction to an unjustly neglected author and a joy for
those of us who already love her writing
In this sensitive and comprehensive biography, Claire Harman
uncovers some steamy new details about Mansfield’s bisexuality, but
doesn’t let the life distract from the blisteringly intense
stories
*The Times, *Books of the Year**
What a gift to the biographer, this life of adventure and sickness
and sex and celebrity - and that's before you start on Mansfield as
a leading modernist . . . It's hard to imagine a more compelling
advocate for Mansfield's fiction, or a better introduction to it .
. . brilliant
*Sunday Times*
A wonderful book to mark the centenary of Mansfield's death . . .
[her] clever insistence on placing the life and work side by side
allows her to give brief but powerful accounts of Mansfield's
relations with other writers
*Spectator*
Harman combines literary criticism with uncovering the life of the
influential modernist writer, via chapters linked to individual
short stories. The best literary biographies make you want to go
back to the subject’s work with renewed passion, and Harman more
than succeeds. In fact, her enthusiasm goes some way into bringing
Mansfield’s own vitality to the page
*Independent, Books of the Year*
A kind of masterclass on the short story, taking the ideal
practitioner as its focus . . . a valuable reminder of why - a
hundred years after her death - we should still be reading and
marvelling at Katherine Mansfield's stories
*Daily Telegraph*
A worthy addition to the corpus of Mansfield interpretation . . .
Like all the best writer biographies, All Sorts of Lives makes you
reach again for the works
*Financial Times*
Step aside, Virginia Woolf - it was Katherine Mansfield who ushered
in the modern age
*Daily Telegraph*
An excellent, sensitively written introduction
*The Times*
An engaging, perceptive critical work, that is inseparable from the
rich expanse of Mansfield biography. What the book so insists on,
and so compellingly brings home, is Mansfield's utter commitment to
the demands of writing
*Newsroom*
What a searching, incisive and compulsive book. A lesson in how to
read and connect and understand, it achieves a beautiful synthesis
between Mansfield's stories, her life and our apprehension of both
these things
*Sunjeev Sahota*
Sensitive and comprehensive
*The Times*
Harman's book does that thing that all good literary biographies
do. It sends us straight back into the delicate, exhilarating,
risking world of Mansfield's fiction
*The Times Literary Supplement*
[A] lucent biography
*Tablet*
This biography, graced by Harman's deep understanding as a reader,
allows the work and the life to unfold side by side, a pairing
designed for maximum impact... puts art - the beating heart of a
writer's life - centre stage
*New Statesman*
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