KATHERINE MANSFIELD

PROFESSION Author
PLACE OF BIRTH Wellington, New Zeland
BORN 1888
DIED 1923

"Start very early. Titiokura - the rough roads and glorious mountains and bush.
The top of Turangakumu. Next day, walking and the bush, clematis and orchids.
At last come the Waipunga Falls, the fierce wind, the flax..."
Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington as the daughter of a successful businessman. Her family was
wealthy enough to afford to send her to Queen's College, London for her education. She then returned to
New Zealand for two years, before going back to London to pursue a literary career.
She quickly fell into the bohemian way of life lived by many artists of that era. With little money, she met,
married and left her first husband, George Bowden, all within just three weeks. She then found herself
pregnant (not by her husband) and was forced to stay in a Bavarian hotel by her concerned mother. She
miscarried the child, but the whole sequence of events and experiences gave her the impetus to publish
her first collection of Short Stories the German Pension (1911). In that same year she met the critic and
essayist John Middleton Murray. Their tempestuous relationship together brought Katherine Mansfield into
contact with many of leading lights of English literature of that era. Most notably, she came to the attention
of D. H. Lawrence. This attention is most obvious in his depiction of Mansfield and Murry as Gudrun and
Gerald in Woman in Love (1917).
Her life and work were changed forever with the death of her brother during The Great War. She was
shocked and traumatised by the experience, so much so that her work began to take refuge in the
nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand. For the imperial historian, it is this body of
work that is the most interesting: Prelude (1917), Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden party and
Other Stories. (1922) She could evoke stunning mental images of the natural beauty of New Zealand as
well as showing a keen ear for the oddities of Upper Class English and Colonial society.
The last years of her life were punctuated with bouts of the tuberculosis that would eventually kill her in
1923. This sense of impending and unnaturally early death also added to the sharpness and poignancy of
her later works. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, would later publish many of her works, letters and
papers posthumously. However, he guarded her image jealously and is thought to have censored much of
this body of work.

https://www.britishempire.co.uk/biography/mansfield.htm