On 31 December 1922, Katherine Mansfield wrote what would turn out to be her last letter to her father, Harold Beauchamp, describing her life at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon, France:

As is well known and has become part of her legend, Mansfield had chosen to enter this Institute after trying, without success, numerous medical treatments for her tuberculosis. It was a move ridiculed by several of her contemporaries who thought she was misguidedly turning her back on (Western) medicine in favour of an (Eastern) charlatan, the Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher and philosopher George Gurdjieff. Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, for example, respectively judged Mansfield to be in the grip of a ‘psychic shark’ in a ‘retreat for maniacs’, a ‘rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt’. Even Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, ‘noisily regretted’ her being taken in by ‘the spiritual quackery of Gurdjieff’. It would be easy to read Mansfield's words to her father, with their reference to the smell of cows as having healing properties, as evidence of her wrong-headed decision. In this vein, her claim that she wanted to write a book called ‘The Cowiness of the Cow’ could be dismissed either as a joke or just a silly idea.

When read in full, however, there is little in Mansfield's letter to support the notion that she had lost her senses and given up on her health, while there are also hints that her projected bovine book was more than a passing fancy. She opens with sober commentary on her ‘very tame semi-existence’ at the Institute, with emphasis not on dramatic spiritual revelation but on everyday bodily (dis)comfort: ‘My heart’, she writes, ‘under this new treatment, which is one of graduated efforts and exercise, feels decidedly stronger, and my lungs in consequence feel quieter too.