Six months after their first encounter, Katherine tenders Virginia an extravagant offer of deepest, truest friendship: a comradeship of passionate writers, not just sharing life, experience and – ‘how rare’ – their ‘precious art’ but scrupulously truthful: the freedom of the city with nothing kept back – no hidden spaces, locked rooms, dark closets, nothing withheld, doctored, expunged: in a word, no secrets.

But isn't it too late? ‘I have had a slight rapprochement with Katherine Mansfield; who seems to me an unpleasant but forcible and utterly unscrupulous character, in whom I think you might find a “companion”’, Virginia has already told Vanessa Bell. Hardly have they met than there's distance between them. A scruple, like a pebble in the shoe, pains the conscience – knowing together – if one doesn’t, as it were, walk straight. Virginia's teasing suggestion that utterly unscrupulous Katherine might be a suitable companion for her sister softens the bite of her dashed-off impression, and her comic vision of these crooked characters in league may be an apotropaic gesture against their forming a closer alliance than hers with each of them.

But why does Virginia paint Katherine as unscrupulous, even in fun? And why does Katherine stipulate scrupulous truthfulness as the bedrock of the friendship she proposes? Is it something she hopes for from Virginia? ‘Dont cry me an ardent creature or say, with your head a little on one side as though you knew some enchanting secret: “Well, Katherine, we shall see”’, she coaxes in the same letter (epigraph, my emphasis). Katherine's mid-August visit to Asheham gives them ‘good […] time to talk’, but Virginia's head must remain tilted, for, thanking her, Katherine adds, ‘don't let THEM ever persuade you that I spend any of my precious time swapping hats or committing adultery – I’m far too arrogant & proud’.

‘She's always there’, sighed someone at the 2017 Katherine Mansfield Conference when Virginia Woolf's name cropped up yet again, and the audience sighed with her: ‘she's always there’. Mansfield's ardent over-ture of friendship to Woolf launched a relationship of mutual admi-ration and fascination shot through with misunderstanding, wariness, rivalry and envy. Now ‘curious & thrilling’, now warm, absorbing and intimate; now distant, dormant, secretly dismissive, always competitive, often foundering in ‘quicksands’, their six-year friendship was, for all its ambivalence, uniquely valued by them both for the sake of their ‘precious art’. ‘You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another’, Mansfield declared in her last letter to Woolf. After her death, Woolf echoed, ‘Probably we had something in common which I shall never find in anyone else’; ‘K. & I had our relationship; & never again shall I have one like it.’ They embraced each other's passion for writing and stimulated mutual creative experi-ment until Mansfield's severe illness and early death put an end to their ‘priceless talk’. While Murry shepherded Mansfield's work into posthumous print, Virginia forged ahead on her own path for another eighteen years, influence and rivalry no longer mutual but (and still?) not ended.

If their asymmetrical lifespans shape their bodies of work, the Edinburgh Edition of Mansfield's Collected Works, following on earlier editions of her stories, essays, letters, notebooks and poems, establishes her place among her contemporaries and nourishes the ever-burgeoning study of Mansfield in myriad contexts, including her deep ‘affinity’ with Woolf. In 2015 Kathryn Simpson and Melinda Harvey edited a Special Topic section of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany on Woolf and Mansfield. Returning hospitality, Volume 10 of Katherine Mansfield Studies invites affinities, divergences and legacies and illuminate ways in which they are ‘there’ in one another's creative life and work. Woolf into its pages as scholars and creative writers explore these artists’

The enigmatically titled painting on our cover, The Other Room by Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, suggests that women artists think not only ‘back through our mothers’, as Woolf observes in A Room of One's Own, but sideways through their sisters – not just blood-sister artists highlighted in the Woolf–Bell alliance but contemporaries such as Mansfield and Woolf, who have ‘the same job’ and share creative wellsprings.

When Diana Swanson and Pamela Caughie first invited me to organize this roundtable, we discussed bringing together some of the contributors to Virginia Woolf and War, the 1991 essay collection published in the Syracuse UP series, Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution. But in the more than two decades since I claimed in that volume that “all Woolf's work is deeply concerned with war; that it helps redefine our understanding of the nature of war; and that from her earliest to her final work she sought to explore and make clear the connections between private and public violence, between the domestic and the civic eff ects of patriarchal society, between male supremacy and the absence of peace, and between ethics and aesthetics” (3), there has been such an abundance of sophisticated work done on violence in its many forms, both in the context of modernist studies and of Woolf scholarship generally, extending and complicating our understanding of violence, conflict, force and aesthetics, that a retrospective look seemed likely to be less valuable than more current reflections. It is a long time since it has been possible to think of Woolf in isolation from her contemporaries or as a voice disconnected from the political currents of her time. Virginia Woolf and War played its part in that transformation of Woolf's reception.

The four scholars on this roundtable each have thought deeply about issues of violence, war, peace, conflict, force, and form in the work of Virginia Woolf. In At The Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, Sarah Cole describes Woolf as “one of the great formalists of violence in the twentieth century” (37), a description that brought home to me the vast change in Woolf's cultural presence eff ected by the past few decades of scholarship. Ashley Foster's work examines the interrelationships among pacifism, modernism, and war and tries to recuperate the lost threads of modernism's pacifist history.

In the relative calm before the Great War, the Cambridge historian and Apostle Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson—Goldie to his Bloomsbury friends—wrote what his biographer E. M. Forster judged “an excellent verse play”: “War and Peace: A Dramatic Fantasia” (Goldsworthy 178). In 1917 Roger Fry's avowedly internationalist Omega Club, whose members included Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, W. B. Yeats, Arnold Bennett, and George Bernard Shaw, staged the play's Prologue with Winifred Gill's handmade marionettes as a benefit for Belgian war refugees. The war-extolling Italian Futurist and protofascist F. T. Marinetti had roared in and out of London several times between 1910 and early 1914 to “hurl…against the stars” his defi ant creed that art, like life, “can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice” (16). To Marinetti's avant-garde celebration of technological violence fed “on fi re, on hatred, and on speed”—“We wish to glorify war—the sole cleanser of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman”—Dickinson opposed an allegorical fantasia that pits Futurist ideology against the opposing goal of Peace (16, 14).

Featuring Saxon Sydney-Turner double-cast as War and St. Peter, James Strachey as Violence and Reason, Lytton Strachey as Futurist and Cynic, and “Winnie” (or her marionette) as Peace, Goldie's post-Nietzschean, proto-Brechtian morality play begins with Violence and Futurist—who are, the stage directions specify, “almost indistinguishable”—tumbling out of an aeroplane at heaven's gate and waking Peter up (“WP” 2). Peter explains how things are in heaven: there's always been “no end of friction” between the war-mongering Father and his peace-loving Son; now they've reached an “impasse” and both have vacated the premises, leaving Peter to guard War and Peace (“WP” 5-6). Violence and Futurist “dance menacingly around” Peter “in boxing attitudes” till he surrenders War (10). As Futurist gloats, “Didn't you see me animalise the man, / Vegetalise, electrify, and magnetise?…His hair was a battery, his eyes / Electric sparks” (10).