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First edition thus, number 708 of 1,200 copies produced by the elite printer Hans Mardersteig of the Officina Bodoni and illustrated with queer colour lithographs by the Parisian Cubist artist Marie Laurencin. This anthology volume selects Katherine Mansfield's "best" stories from across her career, and as such the contents slightly differ from her celebrated collection published under the same title in 1922. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) ranks among the most important short-story writers of the 20th century. Forever leaving behind her native New Zealand in 1908, she embarked on her literary career while pursuing a peripatetic, bohemian life in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Mansfield's experiences of familial estrangement and persistent ill-health heavily influenced her work, which grew to four published story collections before her premature death from tuberculosis. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, edited a fifth collection posthumously. Virginia Woolf remembered Mansfield for having "the only writing I have ever been jealous of... Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else" (p. 227). Through her stories, journals, and letters, Mansfield still enjoys cult status "for her divination of the hatred and cruelties beneath the sweet surfaces of family life; and for her sympathy with the vulnerable, the displaced, and the lonely" (ODNB). Though printed in 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War delayed First edition thus, number 708 of 1,200 copies produced by the elite printer Hans Mardersteig of the Officina Bodoni and illustrated with queer colour lithographs by the Parisian Cubist artist Marie Laurencin. This anthology volume selects Katherine Mansfield's "best" stories from across her career, and as such the contents slightly differ from her celebrated collection published under the same title in 1922. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) ranks among the most important short-story writers of the 20th century. Forever leaving behind her native New Zealand in 1908, she embarked on her literary career while pursuing a peripatetic, bohemian life in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Mansfield's experiences of familial estrangement and persistent ill-health heavily influenced her work, which grew to four published story collections before her premature death from tuberculosis. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, edited a fifth collection posthumously. Virginia Woolf remembered Mansfield for having "the only writing I have ever been jealous of... Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else" (p. 227). Through her stories, journals, and letters, Mansfield still enjoys cult status "for her divination of the hatred and cruelties beneath the sweet surfaces of family life; and for her sympathy with the vulnerable, the displaced, and the lonely" (ODNB). Though printed in 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War delayed publication until 1947. READ MORE Large octavo. Original green and white patterned cloth, spine lettered in gilt on red ground, top edge yellow, fore and bottom edges untrimmed. With dust jacket and the publisher's card slipcase. With 16 colour lithographs in the text. Title page printed in red and black. Publisher's note tipped in following title page. Christmas gift inscription to front pastedown. Very light foxing to boards, book block edges, and endpapers; a near-fine copy in the jacket with browned spine and a little creasing to edges, issued without printed price. Slight splits to head and foot of slipcase. Kirkpatrick D6. Alex Pilcher, A Queer Little History of Art, 2017; Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, 1978.