The author of two critically successful historical novels, Prisoner of Palmary and The Etruscan, Linda Lapin turns her gifted hand to fictional biography in Katherine’s Wish. Short-lived and so poignantly, if not tragically, dedicated to the art of fiction as Romantic poets once lived and died for the Muse, the unconventional Katherine Mansfield is brought to life in this novel of 1918 to 1923, encompassing her marriage to British critic John Middleton Murry, her travels across war-devastated Europe, and her death by tuberculosis at the spiritual asylum in Fountainbleau run by G. I. Gurdjieff. Like the “new biography” of Lytton Strachey and analogous fiction by Virginia Woolf, Lappin’s fictional life of Mansfield recreates the ineffable, “rainbow-like” essence of a human being from the inside perspective of three people: Mansfield herself, her traveling friend Ida Baker, and Murry. The factual basis of Lappin’s work is scrupulously researched so that the milieu, or social and literary context, seems to come alive, too. Even away from London, in the chapter “Hotel Beau Rivage, 1918,” for example, Bloomsbury beckons, heightening the longing as well as the pain of separation.

--Wayne K. Chapman, Editor, The South Carolina Review