“A sensitive and scholarly account of the fiercely independent life of the modernist writer whose talent was the envy of Virginia Woolf.”

The Guardian, "Best Memoirs and Biographies of 2025"

"With some new material shedding light on Mansfield’s key personal relationships and a fine appreciation of her literary technique, this is an essential contribution to Mansfield scholarship, not to mention a fascinating read for general audiences."

Library Journal

"As Kimber writes in her fascinating new biography, Mansfield possessed ‘a supreme gift for storytelling that has never been equalled.’ . . . Kimber is an authority on Mansfield’s life and work."

The Spectator

"You will find [the Mansfield story] here in its brilliant light and terrible shadow, its weird Kiwi mix of the banal and the marvellous."

New Zealand Listener

"What we often think of as experimental fiction, usually considered as part of Modernism at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, would not have happened without Katherine Mansfield. . . . Kimber embeds her readings of Mansfield’s stories within a fairly traditional biography, but she is keen to emphasise originality and innovation."

International Times

"Kimber’s new biography of Katherine Mansfield, called A Hidden Life . . . manages to correct an abundance of gaps in our appreciation of just who she was and what she accomplished in her sad but turbulent life. Kimber, the Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton (and who was also the president of the Katherine Mansfield Society for ten years) is the ideal candidate to set the record straight regarding this renegade writer, whose personal life, lived as large and fast as her fiction was intimate and slow, contained many of the germs and impetus [that] informed her quiet narrative art. . . . Kimber’s new and comprehensive chronicle of her interior and exterior life leaves her with a proper elegy while also bestowing on us all a testament to the sheer tenacity of a woman who refused to be anything other than who she really was."

Donald Brackett | Embodied Meanings

"A new biography of the New Zealand short story writer and poet who was a key figure in London’s early twentieth century literary scene before her early death aged thirty-four in 1923. Kimber’s own new research about Mansfield’s relationships and friendships is a welcome addition to understanding her life."

Fine Books and Collections

“[The book] provides a wealth of new material and insights. . . . [Kimber] is good at making connections, at filling out and tightening the narrative. Readings of the stories often provide information when other sources are missing. . . . Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life expands the Mansfield story, and gives us a writer who is feisty, sexually adventurous, confounded in her ‘messy life’ by disasters of her own making, experiencing extremes of despair and wild exultation, and finally, impressively, making her own reckoning.”

Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter

"This is a glorious treat for all Katherine Mansfield enthusiasts. It’s a painstakingly researched and stylishly told account of Mansfield’s tempestuous life, with much new information, and sensitive analysis of her brilliant short stories."

Dame Jacqueline Wilson

"With its new findings, Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life transforms our understandings of Mansfield and of modernism. A world expert on Mansfield, Kimber has extensively researched the fascinating entanglements of Mansfield’s life to produce a biography like no other."

Maggie Humm, author of "The Bloomsbury Photographs"

"Kimber’s much-anticipated biography is one of those once-in-a-decade books that promises to shift by significant degrees our understanding of this leading modernist’s short but intensely lived creative life. Mansfield steps from the pages of Kimber’s carefully researched account in a fresh combination of roles. A Hidden Life also gives us a Mansfield who was not only an innovator of the modernist short story, but also a pioneer in the now boom genre of fictionalized life-writing."

Elleke Boehmer, novelist, professor of world literature in English, University of Oxford, and patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society