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 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 * 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 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 * 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 * Step aside, Virginia Woolf - it was Katherine Mansfield who ushered in the modern age -- Frances Wilson * Daily Telegraph * An excellent, sensitively written introduction -- Miranda Seymour * The Times * 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 * 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 *