What Virginia Woolf called ‘Childlikeness’ is a facet of Mansfield’s personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, have children as protagonists. It is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication and it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from an early age for school magazines and other publications, feature children. Even as an adult, Mansfield’s love of the miniature, her delight in children in general, her fascination with dolls, all feature in her personal writing. Her relationship with John Middleton Murry was characterised by their mutual descriptions of themselves as little children fighting against a corrupt world.
Including a newly discovered short story potentially by Mansfield, with an explanatory essay, this volume engages each of these aspects of the child in Mansfield’s work and life.