The trugic details of Katherine Mansfield’s illness are only hinted at in her letters and journal. We are indebted to her husband, JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY,for this fuller understanding of the writer as she was during the First World War, in France — lonely and cut off from her friends in England. In the midst of her illness and grieving over the death of her brother, she was given a new lease of life by a timid, elderly Englishman who lives again in these heretofore unpublished letters to her husband.