Introduction: Thinking Sideways through One’s Sisters

‘She’s always there’, sighed someone at the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Conference when Virginia Woolf’s name cropped up yet again, and the audience sighed with her: ‘she’s always there’. Mansfield’s ardent overture of friendship to Woolf launched a relationship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with misunderstanding, wariness, rivalry and envy. Now ‘curious & thrilling’, now warm, absorbing and intimate; now distant, dormant, secretly dismissive, always competitive, often foundering in ‘quicksands’, their six-year friendship was, for all its ambivalence, uniquely valued by them both for the sake of their ‘precious art’....