In November 1919, Katherine Mansfield's critical review of Virginia Woolf's novel Night and Day was published under the title ‘A Ship Comes Into the Harbour’ in her husband John Middleton Murry's journal, the Athenaeum. Her private sentiments on the novel, expressed in letters to Murry in November of the same year, were equally negative. Well known to Mansfield scholars, these letters articulate a slightly different critique from that of the review. While her review concentrates on questions of form, specifically the very conventional novelistic structure Woolf had chosen for the novel, Mansfield's private reaction focuses upon another matter entirely: Woolf's evocation of an Edwardian setting that, to Mansfield, was tantamount to an evasion of the subject of the war altogether:

A defender of Woolf's novel might raise a legitimate objection to this charge. When living through a historical event as momentous as the First World War, is a past setting necessarily tantamount to an elision? And does Mansfield not leave herself open to precisely the same criticism? Mansfield never published a novel, but her longest story, ‘Prelude’ (1917), a distillation of an earlier draft entitled ‘The Aloe’, is similarly set in a historical past that predates the war. At first glance, ‘Prelude’ seems, like Night and Day, absolutely to ‘leave the war out’; however, examining the textual history of ‘Prelude’ reveals a quite different story. Unlike the work into which it would evolve, the original draft of ‘The Aloe’, primarily composed in Paris in early 1915, has a number of scenes in which echoes can be heard of the conflict that was raging less than a hundred miles away when Mansfield first wrote them. In this essay, I identify and analyse these moments in ‘The Aloe’, and link them both to Mansfield's experiences of the First World War in early 1915, and to her other writing of the period. Through the process of editing ‘Prelude’, I argue that the war moves from a metaphorical yet tangible presence in the text, to a seeming and signifying absence.