ABSTRACT
Katherine Mansfield could have claimed, with even more justification than Antonia White, to have produced a "superb collection of beginnings." Even her most substantial piece of work, in an opus of short stories, is a longer story called "Prelude." The collection of her manuscripts, held at the Alexander Turn bull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, is a huge archive of exercise books, engagement diaries, and notebooks from the 1910s and 1920s, most of them barely written in. While Stead's claim seems overstated, Gordon's claim depends on theoretical questions concerning the nature of authorship and the diary, and concerning the relative importance of the entry and the sequential organising principle as defining features of the diary. Writing in the diary functions for many diarists as a way of locating themselves both in the moment of writing and in their surroundings.
