John Middleton Murry met Katherine Mansfield in December of 1911, when he was a callow twenty-one and she was a worldly and self-possessed twenty-two. Both were promising young writers whose careers were in their infancy (he had recently founded a small journal, Rhythm; she had published a book of stories) and whose lives revolved around their dedication to literary art (“An ideal of the good life,” Murry would write in his 1920 essay “The Function of Criticism,” “must inevitably be aesthetic”). A strong attraction developed, and in March of 1912 he moved into her London flat, thus beginning an intense, eleven-year-long relationship—which was not made official, by the way, till 1917.

Despite their genuine love for each other, however, the story of Murry and Mansfield is largely a story of separation. Because of his London commitments (after Rhythm, he was editor, in turn, of The Blue Review, Signature, and the Atheneum, as well as reviewer for the Westminster Review and the Times Literary Supplement) and her frequent need to be on the Continent (at first for various personal reasons, and later because of her failing health), they spent as much time apart as they did together. Thus we have The Letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield. This substantial volume constitutes a comprehensive record of a decade during which both writers produced their major works and established considerable reputations—he as a sober-minded, demi-modernist critic with a taste for