In spite of all the differences between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, their biographers and critics underline a strong affinity between the two writers. What brought Mansfield and Woolf together was their passion for writing, their desire to become professional writers and to find a new voice that could genuinely express their female experience. Having a partner to discuss and share ideas on new ways of writing was of immense importance to each of them and had direct creative consequences for their work. In the light of existing evidence it comes as a surprise that opinions of Woolf and Mansfield as bitter rivals, and of Woolf as Mansfield’s enemy, still persist. The aim of this essay, then, is to present their relationship, with all its vicissitudes, as a story of a professional friendship, drawing on the findings of the Woolf and Mansfield criticism and on my own reading of their letters and works.