I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.

Bliss the story that lent its name to her second collection of stories in 1920 was also publiKatherine Mansfieldd in 1918. However Mansfield wrote only one story during her time there (Something Childish But Very Natural) before Murry was recalled to London to declare bankruptcy. The Dictionary of National Biography reports that Katherine Mansfield now came to feel that her attitude to life had been unduly rebellious and Katherine Mansfield sought during the days that remained to her to renew and compose her spiritual life.

During the First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the age of 34. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom Katherine Mansfield became close friends. Among her best-known stories are "The Garden Party" "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "The Fly".