Episode One

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 1917, 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 six 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 1
1917. For the first time, Virginia Woolf visits her new author - Katherine Mansfield - at her home in Chelsea.

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 BBC 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 BBC Radio 4