Katherine Mansfield

Gifted with a keen insight into human character, Katherine Mansfield wrote a number of almost perfect short stories. Much of her work is based on incidents and scenes from her own life.

She was born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888, as the daughter of a banker. Katherine Mansfield was her pen name. Her early years were spent in the village of Karori, near Wellington. In 1903, when she was 15, she went to London to study at Queen’s College. After three years she reluctantly returned to New Zealand. In 1908 she persuaded her father to provide her with an allowance and allow her to live in England. She had become an accomplished cellist, but she now turned to writing.

After a brief unhappy marriage, Mansfield met John Middleton Murry. He was then an Oxford undergraduate, but he was soon to become a well-known critic. Their marriage was successful. Murry wrote: “She was natural and spontaneous as no other human being I have ever met.” Deeply distressed by the death of her only brother, Leslie, in World War I, and already suffering from poor health, she went to the French Riviera in 1916. There she began to write the stories for which she is best known, tales of her childhood in New Zealand. She died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in France on January 9, 1923.

In her career, Mansfield strove for a pure style that would express simple reality. Her writing is sensitive, reflecting subtle variations in mood. In a German Pension, a collection of short stories, was published in 1911. Not until 1920, with Bliss and Other Stories, did she obtain recognition, though. After her death, Murry brought out several volumes of her writings that had not previously been published.