LM (Leslie Moore)

Born in 1888, Ida Constance Baker wrote as Lesley or Leslie Moore, often shortened to LM. Records from the National Library of New Zealand identify her as a close friend of Katherine Mansfield, while the Katherine Mansfield Society notes that the two met at Queen's College in London and that Ida adopted the name “Lesley Moore.”

Under the name LM, she published novels including The Wiser Folly and The Peacock Feather, and her work is preserved by Project Gutenberg. In later life she became best known for Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM (1971), a memoir that offers a first-hand view of Mansfield’s life and character.

She was born in Stuston, Suffolk, and died in 1978. Although her fiction is less widely read now than Mansfield’s work, her books still interest readers drawn to early-20th-century writing and to the literary world that surrounded Mansfield.