An excerpt from "The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art," June, 1923:
"It is rare indeed for a collection of posthumous stories, most of them unfinished, to give the impression of greater range and profundity than the writer's earlier, rounded and completed, works. Yet "The Doves' Nest" makes us, if possible, even more vividly aware than before of what the world has lost by the death of Katherine Mansfield. She was only thirty-four; and, when she died, her genius was rapidly deepening and enriching itself, like a tree that pushes its roots more securely into earth as its branches tower more happily into heaven. Mr. H. G. Wells, in appreciation quoted by the publishers, speaks of "K. M.'s perfectly lovely mind." It is the just phrase. And one can even understand what he means when he goes on to say: "I put K. M. above the world of effort and compromise." Literally, of course, that means nothing : the only world we know has effort and compromise for the essentials of its existence, and to be above it would amount to being, for human comprehension, unreal. But when, amid the stormy imperfections of life, we come upon something so simple that we feel the first freshness of a child's mind might have uttered it, and yet so wise that it illuminates our whole body of experience, we fly to stay!"
