Spanning three years in the life of writer Katherine Mansfield during the First World War, this novel follows the ups and downs of her relationship with Jack Middleton Murry and her struggle to break through as a writer. As her brother and lovers are drawn into the conflict, Mansfield becomes ever more determined to write the "new kind of fiction" that she feels the times demand. While sticking scrupulously to what is known of Mansfield's life and friends (a cast that includes D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf), this extraordinary novel takes the reader beyond biography into the mind and heart of its subject.