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Virginia and Katherine by Alison MacLeod

An original commission to mark the centenary of 'Mrs Dalloway', this is a story about the friendship and rivalry between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, and includes letters by both writers.

In 1916, needing material for their newly-established Hogarth Press, Virginia and Leonard Woolf agree to publish a story from an emerging talent from New Zealand: Katherine Mansfield. Over the next seven years - until Katherine’s death in 1923 - the two women enjoyed a complicated friendship which, despite moments of bitchiness or silence, was also the meeting of two original minds.

Episode 4
Katherine returns to London although she is still in poor health. But the Hogarth Press publishes her story ‘Prelude’. And she is still writing.

Alison MacLeod’s most recent novel, 'Tenderness', was a New York Times ‘Best Book’ of the year and a ‘Best Paperback’ of the year for The Sunday Times. Her novel 'Unexploded' was nominated for the Man-Booker Prize and adapted for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4. She is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester, a Writers' Award recipient of the British Library, and currently lectures on a part-time basis at Anglia Ruskin University, where she contributes to the Cambridge Writing Centre.

Writer: Alison MacLeod
Reader: Greta Scacchi
Producer: Jeremy Osborne

With thanks to the Society of Authors on behalf of the Estates of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield

A Sweet Talk Production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4