In 1922 a strange encounter took place between the mage George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and the passionate and tragic writer Katherine Mansfield.

Consumed with tuberculosis, yet at the summit of her powers, she came to Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, and there, on 9 January 1923, she died.

Why did Katherine submit to Gurdjieff? Why was she speeded on her way by the 'desperado of genius', A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age? And by P. D. Ouspensky, brilliant Russian philosopher and mathematician?

Why, against the advice of Katherine's doctors, did Gurdjieff receive her? What was the true relationship between Gurdjieff and Mansfield? Why did D. H. Lawrence vehemently attack 'Gourdjieff' and call Katherine a 'loathsome reptile'?  Why did she die on the very day that her husband, the fashionable literary critic John Middleton Murry, arrived from London? Why was she buried in a seventh-class communal grave?

Drawing on unpublished sources inaccessible to previous biographers and on personal interviews with the last survivors from Fontainebleau, James Moore illuminates these tantalising questions with love and irony.  Here is a thesis which casts an entirely new light on Gurdjieff's masterpiece Beelzebub, and on the mysterious denouement to Katherine Mansfield's brief and vivid life.

Details:

Hardcover, 280 pages (July 10, 1980)

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 0710004885

Gurdjieff Studies has a limited number of new copies (spine and pages in fine condition, some fading of dust-jacket: price-clipped) for sale.

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