In a German Pension.

London: Stephen Swift & Co. Ltd,, [1911]. To no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing" - Virginia Woolf First edition, first impression, one of approximately 500 copies only, a lovely example of Mansfield's scarce first book. This collection of short stories was inspired by her confinement by her mother at Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria following a pregnancy and miscarriage outside of wedlock: "a set of bold stories, some humorous and cynical, some with a strongly feminist slant" (ODNB). Leaving her native New Zealand for good in 1908, Mansfield (1888-1923) lived a peripatetic, bohemian life in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group in London, often amongst her friends Ida Baker and A. R. Orage. She capably insinuated herself into the scene at Garsington Manor in 1916, where she "made a conquest" of Lady Ottoline Morell. She also had a productive and close friendship with Virginia Woolf, whom she met in 1917; of Mansfield, Woolf wrote in her diary: "to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here"; and that she got "the queerest sense of an echo coming back to me from [Mansfield's] mind the second after I've spoken" (Woolf, pp. 45 and 61). Mansfield's experiences of familial estrangement and persistent ill-health served to influence her work, which often deals in themes of anxiety, sexuality, and existentialism. Following her death from tuberculosis, she was remembered "for her divination of the hatred and cruelties beneath the sweet surfaces of family life; and for her sympathy with the vulnerable, the displaced, and the lonely", and her work, including her journal, retains cult status, particularly among young women (ODNB). Octavo. Original green cloth, spine and front board lettered in gilt, blind stamped book and arrow pattern to front board. Housed in a green cloth slipcase. Extremities a little rubbed, edges and preliminary and end matter foxed, a touch of offsetting to endpapers, a very good copy indeed. Kirkpatrick A1a. A. O. Bell, A. McNellie (eds.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1978.