Within a month of her return to London in 1908, keen to embrace the opportunities that the city had to offer, Katherine Mansfield attended her first suffrage meeting, on which she intended to write a newspaper report. Recounting the experience, she wrote in a letter:

Critics have long interpreted this antipathy towards the suffrage movement as evidence of Mansfield's political naivety or lack of political engagement. Antony Alpers, for instance, argues that ‘Kass Beauchamp was never an incipient feminist’ and suggests that none of her early writings ‘would have bestirred an Edwardian reader to “sit down and write a cheque”’ in support of women's causes. Andrew Bennett, likewise, asserts that ‘Mansfield's feminism is largely invisible’, whilst Sydney Janet Kaplan contends that Mansfield ‘did not articulate her social critique of human suffering in recognizably political terms’ or connect this critique to ‘feminist political analysis’. I argue in this chapter, however, that it was precisely Mansfield's aversion to the suffrage movement that connects her to the feminist movement. Situating her contributions to The New Age within the original historical contexts of publication enables us to trace the ways in which Mansfield helped to foster an emergent, radical version of individualist feminism constituted in clear opposition to the suffrage movement and shaped by contemporary discourses about nationhood and empire.