Before they met in 1917, Virginia Woolf envisioned a peculiar setting for her first encounter with Katherine Mansfield, the promising young writer who had ‘dogged [her] steps three years’. Intriguingly, imagined she might glimpse not drawing-room of mutual friend or at literary soirée, but ‘on rock sea’ – there, ‘I shall accost her’.1 pictures Mansfield an attitude reminiscent Frederic Leighton...