Born in colonial Wellington in 1888, Katherine Mansfield's first encounter with disease came early, when her younger sister Gwen died of cholera in the early days of 1891. The city's poor sanitation contributed to the proliferation of infectious disease that catalysed the family's move from the city centre to more rural Karori. During her adult life in Europe, Mansfield experienced miscarriage, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 1914–18 and the influenza pandemic of 1918–20 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield's literary output and her modes of thinking.

Arthur Frank has argued that ‘[s]eriously ill people […] need to become storytellers’. Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield's creativity – she would write to fund her medical care while simultaneously limited by her poor health, writing in 1922: ‘The real point is I shall have to make as much money as I can on my next book – my path is so dotted with doctors.’ As explored in this volume, her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been lost – her brother, her mother, her grandmother – and endow them with life in the process.

Although D. H. Lawrence wrote unsympathetically to Mansfield: ‘you revolt me stewing in your consumption’, her own attitude towards her illness was generally positive and practical, and she sought to mitigate against its deleterious effects through various strategies. She submitted to a variety of experimental treatments such as radiation, and wrote to her doctor, Victor Sorapure, about methods she had developed for symptom management. Her notebooks also demonstrate that, rather than shying away from her disease and its associations, she had a keen interest in the body, and what might be termed a scientific imagination. Writing of the experience of illness, Mansfield recorded in 1918: ‘Tchekhov has known just EXACTLY this […].