Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in New Zealand in 1888. Her father sent her and her sisters to school in London, where she was editor of the school newspaper. Back in New Zealand, she started to write short stories but she grew tired of her life there. She returned to Europe in 1908 and went on to live in France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland. A restless soul who had many love affairs, her modernist writing was admired by her peers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who published her story 'Prelude' on their Hogarth Press. In 1917 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and she died in France aged only thirty-four.

Dr Meg Jensen is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, London where her research centres on representations of trauma in various forms of autobiographically based art from novels to poetry to painting. She has published on the work of writers including Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac and Louisa May Alcott. Her most recent publication is The Art and Science of Trauma and the Autobiographical: Negotiated Truths.