Claire Harman at Literary Review:
One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ‘the driving necessity – the crying need?’ Ambitious, curious, greedy for experience, she became a formidable innovator, reading and borrowing from other authors, adapting techniques from avant-garde painting, music and new media, and trying all the time to make it new.
It helped that she was no snob about ‘low’ culture and enjoyed panto and vaudeville as much as the cutting-edge art she wrote about for the magazine Rhythm. When ‘the Fillums’ took off dramatically in the 1910s, she became a frequent cinema-goer (there was a theatre very near her flat) and noted down things she thought might make ‘a good cinema film’. Her first date with her future husband, John Middleton Murry, was at the movies, and it’s obvious whose choice that was. ‘Will you suggest the day for the visit to the pictures?’ he wrote. ‘They’re all the same to me.’
more here.