On the occasion of a new Penguin Classics edition of The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, novelist Ali Smith looks back at the life and career of the New Zealand-born fiction writer, who died in 1923 at the age of 32, for The Telegraph. Smith covers Mansfield’s tumultuous, peripatetic life, her influence on such contemporaries as D.H. Lawrence, and her many “afterlives”:

According to the different claims of her various biographers and critics … she’s been a sweet and wholesome tragic victim, a selfish dark-eyed piece of trouble, a feminist, an anti-feminist, a satirist, a sentimentalist, a miniaturist, an overinflated reputation, a repressed lesbian, a colonial bisexual angel-devil plagiarist original.

And though Smith doesn’t mention it, here in Canada Mansfield was recently the subject of the Janice Kulyk Keefer novel Thieves (HarperCollins Canada, 2004).