John Middleton Murry's writing is always confessional; his biographer F. A. Lea observed that ‘in the case of Murry, the distinction between “public” and “private” is impossible to maintain’. Murry published an autobiography in 1935, Between Two Worlds, which finishes at the Armistice, nearly four years before the death of Katherine Mansfield. Between Two Worlds has the postscript: ‘(Here ends the first part of this narrative. Whether the second part will be written depends on many things. I can only say that it is my desire and hope to write it.)’. In 1947 he began the next part but never completed it.

Murry's son, John Middleton Murry Jr (from his second wife, Violet le Maistre, also known as Colin), attached the following to a handwritten version of the second part of the autobiography which is now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington:

Since Colin Murry describes it as an ‘extract’, he may have been aware of a longer version. In the Turnbull there is also a much longer, typewritten MS which reproduces but for a few very minor corrections this ‘extract’. Much like a journal or diary entry, the beginning of this version is headed ‘Nov. 20, 1947’. This longer version has continuous pagination and ‘1953’ is typed in the margin of its last section which deals with events in Murry's life after 1947. Lea quotes extensively from this first section of the autobiography as well as the ‘extract’ that follows. However, Lea makes no reference to the last, post-1947 section, which raises the possibility that there was a third version of the autobiography which concluded in 1947. Only the ‘extract’, or at least the typewritten version of it, is reproduced here because that is the section concerned largely with Mansfield. Some of this section is quoted by Lea and by subsequent Mansfield biographers and critics but the latter make no reference to the original manuscript.