All Sorts of Lives

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

A.L. Kennedy

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

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

Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times

An excellent, sensitively written introduction

Miranda Seymour, The Times

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

Sarah Watling, Daily Telegraph

Step aside, Virginia Woolf - it was Katherine Mansfield who ushered in the modern age

Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph

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

Ruth Scurr, Spectator

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

Catherine Taylor, Financial 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

Kirsty Gunn, 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

Lyndall Gordon, New Statesman

Mansfield's words are so irresistible, her enthusiasms and whimsies so odd and infectious... Harman loves the stories and...her perceptive enthusiasm carries the reader with her

Literary Review

[A] compelling biography... Mansfield's writing has been largely overlooked in the 100 years since her death. But Harman's book looks to correct that, in part by highlighting her great skill in capturing the small details of life

Prospect

[A] perceptive, elegantly written study takes a fresh look at the author's often 'turbulent' life and dazzling, tragically short career, through ten of her trailblazing short stories... This book is a perfect introduction for those new to Mansfield's work, or for fans who want to know more

Lady

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

Vincent O'Sullivan, Newsroom

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*

Sensitive and comprehensive

Susie Goldsbrough, The Times

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