Kathleen Mansfield. Biography

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her most well-known stories are "The Garden Party", "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "The Fly." During the First World War Mansfield contracted tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.

Mansfield was born in 1888, into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. The daughter of a banker and born to a middle-class colonial family, she was also a first cousin of author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim.

Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine in 1898 and 1899. She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen's College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello but she also began contributing to the school newspaper, with such a dedication to it that she eventually became editor during this period. She was particularly interested in the works of the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde.

Mansfield first began journeying into continental Europe from 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. Mansfield's time in Bavaria had a significant effect on her literary outlook. In particular, she was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov. Her experiences of Germany formed the foundation of her first published collection, In a German Pension, which she later described as "immature".

After finishing her schooling in England, Mansfield returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories. She rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle and two years later headed again for London. Mansfield had two lesbian relationships during this period, notable for their pre-eminence in her journal entries.

Soon Mansfield submitted a lightweight story to a new avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. The piece was rejected by the magazine's editor, John Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield responded with "The Woman at the Store", a tale of murder and mental illness. In 1911 Mansfield and Murry began a relationship that culminated in their marriage in 1918, although she left him twice, in 1911 and 1913. In January 1914 moved to Paris, wrote only one story during her time there ("Something Childish But Very Natural"). Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing after 1916, which began with several stories, including "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" and "A Dill Pickle", being published in The New Age.

In December 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rejecting the idea of staying in a sanatorium on the grounds that it would cut her off from writing, she moved abroad to avoid the English winter. She stayed at a half-deserted hotel France, where she became depressed but continued to produce stories, including "Je ne parle pas français". "Bliss", the story that lent its name to her second collection of stories in 1920, was also published in 1918.

Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary haemorrhage in January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs. She died on 9 January and was buried in a cemetery in Avon.

Mansfield proved to have been a prolific writer in the final years of her life. Much of her work remained unpublished at her death, and Murry took on the task of editing and publishing it in two additional volumes of short stories (The Dove's Nest in 1923 and Something Childish in 1924), a volume of Poems, The Aloe, Novels and Novelists, and collections of her letters and journals.