Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic who was an important figure in the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world and have been published in 25 languages.

Born and raised in a house on Tinakori Road in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon, Mansfield was the third child in the Beauchamp family. She began school in Karori with her sisters, before attending Wellington Girls' College. The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends with Maata Mahupuku, who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship. Her mother was Annie Burnell Beauchamp (née Dyer), whose brother married the daughter of Richard Seddon. Her extended family included the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, and her great-grand uncle was a Victorian artist Charles Robert Leslie.

Mansfield had two elder sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother. In 1893, for health reasons, the Beauchamp family moved from Thorndon to the country suburb of Karori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood. She used some of those memories as an inspiration for the short story "Prelude". Mansfield's first printed stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine Her first formally published story "His Little Friend" appeared the following year in a society magazine, New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal.

In 1902, at age 13–14, Mansfield became enamoured of Arnold Trowell, a cellist, but her feelings were for the most part not reciprocated. Mansfield was herself an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father.

Mansfield travelled in Continental Europe between 1903 and 1906, staying mainly in Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England she returned to New Zealand, and only then began in earnest to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her heart set on becoming a professional writer. The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908. Mansfield professed her adoration for her in her journals.

Return to London After having returned to London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into a bohemian way of life. She published one story and one poem during her first 15 months there. they were married on 2 March, but she left him the same evening before the marriage could be consummated. She returned to London in January 1910. She then published more than a dozen articles in Alfred Richard Orage's socialist magazine The New Age and became a friend and lover of Beatrice Hastings, who lived with Orage. Her experiences in Germany formed the foundation of her first published collection In a German Pension (1911), which she later described as "immature". The characters Gudrun and Gerald in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love are based on Mansfield and Murry.

Charles Granville (sometimes known as Stephen Swift), the publisher of Rhythm, absconded to Europe in October 1912 and left Murry responsible for the debts the magazine had accumulated. Mansfield pledged her father's allowance toward the magazine, but it was discontinued, being reorganised as The Blue Review in 1913 and folded after three issues. The couple moved to Paris in January the following year with the hope that a change of setting would make writing easier for both of them. Mansfield wrote only one story during her time there, "Something Childish But Very Natural", then Murry was recalled to London to declare bankruptcy. She began to take refuge in nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand. In a poem describing a dream she had shortly after his death, she wrote:

By the remembered stream my brother standsWaiting for me with berries in his hands..."These are my body. Sister, take and eat." moving house.

Diagnosis of tuberculosis In December 1917, at the age of 29, Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. For part of spring and summer 1918, she joined her friend Anne Estelle Rice, an American painter, at Looe in Cornwall with the hope of recovering. While there, Rice painted a portrait of her dressed in red, a vibrant colour that Mansfield liked and suggested herself. The Portrait of Katherine Mansfield is now held by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Rejecting the idea of staying in a sanatorium on the grounds that it would cut her off from writing, Von Arnim was the first cousin of Mansfield's father. They got on well, although Mansfield considered her wealthier cousin - who had in 1919 separated from her second husband Frank Russell, the elder brother of Bertrand Russell - to be rather patronising. It was a highly productive period of Mansfield's writing, for she felt she did not have much time left. "At the Bay", "The Doll's House", "The Garden Party" and "A Cup of Tea" were written in Switzerland.

Last year and death Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. In February 1922, she went to Paris to have a controversial X-ray treatment from the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin. The treatment was expensive and caused unpleasant side effects without improving her condition. but she spent much of her time there with her mentor Alfred Richard Orage, and her last letters inform Murry of her attempts to apply some of Gurdjieff's teachings to her own life.

Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary haemorrhage on 9 January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs. She died within the hour, and was buried at Cimetière d'Avon, Avon, near Fontainebleau. Because Murry forgot to pay for her funeral expenses, she initially was buried in a pauper's grave; when matters were rectified, her casket was moved to its current resting place.

Mansfield was 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 Doves' Nest in 1923, and Something Childish in 1924); a volume of poems; The Aloe; Novels and Novelists; and collections of her letters and journals.

Works

In a German Pension (1911) Bliss and Other Stories (1920) The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) The Doves' Nest and Other Stories (1923) Poems (1923) Something Childish and Other Stories (1924), first published in the U.S. as The Little Girl The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927, 1954) The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (2 vols, 1928–29) The Aloe (1930) Novels and Novelists (1930) The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (1937) The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield (1939) The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (1945, 1974) Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913–1922 (1951) The Urewera Notebook (1978), The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (1987), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (4 vols, 1984–96) Vol. 1, 1903–17, Vol. 2, 1918–19, Vol. 3, 1919–20, Vol. 4, 1920–21, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (2 vols, 1997), The Montana Stories (2001, a collection of all the material written by Mansfield from June 1921 until her death), An award, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship is offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at her former home, the Villa Isola Bella. New Zealand's pre-eminent short story competition is named in her honour.

Archives of Mansfield material are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington, with other important holdings at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and the British Library in London. There are smaller holdings at New York Public Library and other public and private collections.

Queer icon The Sapphic sensibilities of Mansfield's writing and the documentation of long-term female companionships have supported modern readings of Mansfield as an important part of queer history in New Zealand.

Depictions in literature and the arts Biographies Ruth Elvish Mantz & J. Middleton Murry, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, Constable & Co., 1933 Antony Alpers, Katherine Mansfield, Knopf (U.S.), 1953 and Jonathan Cape (UK), 1954 Leslie Moore (pseudonym of Ida Constance Baker), Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM, Michael Joseph, 1971 Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography, New Directions (U.S.) and Hamish Hamilton (UK), 1978 Antony Alpers, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, Oxford University Press, 1980 Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, Viking, 1987 Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View, Cooper Square Press, 2002 Kathleen Jones, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, Viking Penguin, 2010 Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years, Edinburgh University Press, 2016 Claire Harman, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything, Random House, 2023 Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life, Reaktion Books, 2025 In 1980 italian author Pietro Citati wrote a short biography of Mansfield called “Vita breve di Katherine Mansfield” which won Premio Bagutta 1980

Film and television A Picture of Katherine Mansfield, a 1973 BBC television drama series, starring Vanessa RedgraveThis six-part series includes depictions of Mansfield's life and adaptations of her short stories. Leave All Fair (1985), directed by John Reid, starring Jane Birkin as Mansfield A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer (1987), directed by Julienne Stretton The Life and Writings of Katherine Mansfield (2006), directed by Stacy Waymack Thornton Bliss (2011), a television biopic produced by Michele Fantl and directed by Fiona SamuelDepicts Mansfield's early beginnings as a writer in New Zealand; she is played by Kate Elliott.

Music In 2012, Italian singer-songwriter Giovanni Del Grillo dedicated to Manfield's last days in Fontainebleau the song 'La Terza Via', included in his first album 'Qui Frinisce Male'.

Theatre Katherine Mansfield 1888–1923, dance-drama premiered at the Cell Block Theatre, Sydney in 1978, with choreography by Margaret Barr and script by Joan Scott, which was spoken by the dancers, an actor and actress. Two dancers played Mansfield simultaneously, as "Katherine Mansfield had spoken of herself at times as a multiple person". The Rivers of China by Alma De Groen, premiered at the Sydney Theatre Company in 1987; published by Currency Press. Jones & Jones by Vincent O'Sullivan, a Downstage commission for the Mansfield centenary in 1989; published by Victoria University Press.

Fiction J. M. Murry wrote in Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (1933): "I have been told, by one who should know, that the character of Gudrun in Women in Love was intended for a portrait of Katherine [Mansfield]. If this is true, it confirms me in my belief that Lawrence had curiously little understanding of her... And yet he was very fond of her, as she was of him." Murry said that the fictional incident in the chapter "Gudrun in the Pompadour" – when Gudrun tears a letter from Julian Halliday's hands and storms out – was based on a true event at the Café Royal.

The character Kathleen in Evelyn Schlag's 1987 novel Die Kränkung (published in English as Quotations of a Body) is based on Mansfield.

C. K. Stead's 2004 novel Mansfield depicts the writer in the period 1915–18.

Kevin Boon's 2011 novella Kezia is based on Mansfield's childhood in New Zealand.

Andrew Crumey's 2023 novel Beethoven's Assassins has a chapter featuring Mansfield and A. R. Orage at George Gurdjieff's institute in France.

Works featuring Mansfield Mansfield, A Novel by C. K. Stead, Harvill Press, 2004, In Pursuit: The Katherine Mansfield Story Retold, 2010, a novel by Joanna FitzPatrick Katherine's Wish by Linda Lappin, Wordcraft of Oregon, 2008, Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, 1989, a short story collection by Witi Ihimaera My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn, Spring by Ali Smith, Penguin, 2019, Beethoven's Assassins by Andrew Crumey, Dedalus, 2023, "My Little Governess" in Virginia's Sisters: An Anthology of Women's Writing, Aurora Metro Books, 2023, "A Scent of Mimosa" by Francis King in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories,1975, ISBN 9780224011952

Adaptations of Mansfield's work "The Woman at the Store", an episode from the 1976 anthology television series Winners & Losers was adapted from "The Woman at the Store" by Peter Hansard and Ian Mune. "Chai Ka Ek Cup", an episode from the 1986 Indian anthology television series Katha Sagar was adapted from "A Cup of Tea" by Shyam Benegal. Mansfield with Monsters (Steam Press, 2012), Katherine Mansfield with Matt Cowens and Debbie Cowens The Doll's House (1973), directed by Rudall Hayward "A Dill Pickle", a chamber opera by Matt Malsky was adapted from Mansfield's short story of the same name. It was premiered in October 2021 by the Worcester Chamber Music Society (Worcester MA US) and released on compact disc.