SOURCE: Sigal, Clancy. “Unwonderfully What She Was.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (29 May 1988): 8.

In the following review, Sigal praises Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life as a “level-headed biography,” but notes that Tomalin tries too hard to portray Mansfield's life as a “feminist tragedy.”

Only a passionately self-absorbed actress like Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton could do justice to a film of the writer Katherine Mansfield's life when inevitably, alas, it will be made. Only a Streep or a Keaton would be equal to Mansfield's exquisitely neurotic mixture of melodramatic posing, reckless ambition (without quite the talent to match), self-destructive bisexuality and sheer bloody malice. It is a considerable compliment to Claire Tomalin's coolly balanced biography [Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life] that she keeps us wondering right to the end at Mansfield's untimely death what exactly fascinated her contemporaries about this transplanted New Zealander who crashed London literary society...