The New Zealand-born writer Mansfield (1888-1923) and her husband, Murry, the English editor and literary critic, exchanged hundreds of passionate, probing letters during their tempestuous 11-year relationship. Their correspondence reveals Mansfield's fiercely independent spirit, as well as her intense need for undertanding from Murry from the time she met him at the home of a friend in London in 1912 until a few days before her death from tuberculosis in 1923.