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The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.

The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional treatment of the concept of ‘bliss’, female sexuality, bisexuality, and the power dynamics of marriage. The chapter then explores the ways that Murry's and Mansfield's relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell underlie the structure of ‘Bliss’. It considers how these relations mark a general shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury on Murry and Mansfield.

The mystery of whether Katherine Mansfield inspired Virginia Woolf's story 'Kew Gardens,' has long been of interest to both Woolf and Mansfield scholars. This article returns to this contested question, but rather than focusing on the issue of attribution, it explores what appears to be a ferment of interest surrounding gardens as a literary theme. It argues that Mansfield, Woolf, and their mutual friend, Ottoline Morrell, were discussing their work with one another during the summer of 1917, and were all choosing to write about gardens during this period. This article asks why these three women were interested in gardens as a subject, and demonstrates the degree to which they were sharing ideas.

Argues that the evening gown expresses tensions between women's evolving social, sexual and economic opportunities and a sartorial genre that encodes conservative forms of femininity. Popular texts represent the dress as threatening to the women who wear it, while the professional work of modernist writers at once criticizes and expresses longing for the form. Even women who wanted to experiment with the form found themselves caricatured for doing so.

This chapter explores Virginia Woolf's relationship to poetry by focusing on her encounter with W. B. Yeats at Lady Ottoline Morrell's in November 1930. Drawing on unpublished material by Yeats alongside Woolf's diary entries and letters recounting their meeting, the chapter contextualizes the conversation that led Yeats to write “Spilt Milk,” a poem that opens with a “We” which refers to Yeats, Morrell, Walter de la Mare, and Woolf. “Spilt Milk” epitomizes Yeats's own sense of his side of a performance. Not to cry over spilt milk is an idiom that may have nothing to do with ear trumpets though perhaps with shared admiration for Ottoline Morrell that other people miss, as Woolf said, when confronted by her more “obvious tortuousness and hypocrisy”.

This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that resulted from Murry's negative review of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. It considers the change in these relations when Murry took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, especially the cautious friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and the professional competition between Murry and T. S. Eliot.