MANSFIELD, KATHERINE (1888-1923), née Kathleen Beauchamp, was born at Wellington on 14 Oct 1888, the third daughter of Sir Harold Beauchamp (q.v.). She lived during her childhood at various homes in Wellington and Karori, and was educated in the first instance at the Karori school and afterwards at Miss Swainson's school (later known as Marsden School) in Fitzherbert terrace. While there she evinced a taste for writing, and contributed to the school magazine verse and prose which showed the spark of inspiration. In 1903, with her two elder sisters, she was taken to England and entered a finishing school known as Queen's College, in Harley street, where she edited the college magazine. She was there three years, and incidentally attended the Royal Academy of Music for the study of the 'cello. Reaching New Zealand on her return in Dec 1906, Kathleen soon became impatient of the narrow surroundings and unartistic society of the young country. The desire to write became a passion from which she could find no respite in counter attractions, and she persistently begged her parents to allow her to return to London to make her way in the world of letters. She had read much more deeply and adventurously than most girls of her age. She studied earnestly the reactions and emotions of human beings as she met them in her daily life; and she practised her hand at simple, reflective prose and modest but competent verse. As early as 1904 she had written lyrics, two of which were set to music by her uncle (F. V. Waters) and sung by him at a public dinner.

Though this sojourn of 20 months was her only experience of her native land after her childhood, she utilised it to garner impressions and to perfect her literary style. With delicate sensibility and photographic precision she recorded her sum of human experience, which in the years to come was to be somewhat restricted. She had already dedicated herself to literature before she left England, and her life in New Zealand during those months was engrossed in a struggle with her parents to be allowed to try her wings in London. She read in the library of Parliament a good deal of philosophy (including Heine, Nietzsche and Dr Inazo Nitobe), and much modern poetry, drama and French literature. She received some encouragement from T. L. Mills and E. J. Brady, editor of The Native Companion, and at length, in Jul 1908, when she was only 20 years of age, she left for England. She had already, in her contributions to the Native Companion and Harpers' Bazaar, used the nom de plume 'Katherine Mansfield,' by which alone she is known in the literary world. 'Ambition is a curse,' she wrote in her diary, 'if you are not proof against everything else; unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself to your ambition.' Within three years of her return to London Katherine Mansfield had established her reputation as a writer of short stories of exquisite workmanship and fine sensibility. In 1911 appeared In a German Pension. Meanwhile trials and experience of a deeply emotional kind came to her. On 2 Mar 1909 she made an injudicious marriage (with George Bowden) which meant nothing to her spiritually and greatly embarrassed her for some years. It was not dissolved till 29 Apr 1918, when her life had already for some years been linked with that of J. Middleton Murry. In 1910 and 1911 she contributed to The New Age, and in 1911-13 to Rhythm and The Blue Review, of which Murry was associate-editor. In 1915, with the help of Murry and D. H. Lawrence, she compiled and edited a magazine called The Signature. The war of 1914-18, despite its distractions, brought about the renewal of a friendship with her young brother (Leslie) which had been the dominating factor in her personal life. It was broken again, all too soon, by his death on active service (7 Oct 1915). Her own ill-health was promoted by the alarms and deprivations of war, and tuberculosis was now established in her system. She suffered another severe shock in the death of her mother (on Aug 1918).

Through it all Katherine Mansfield wrote fervently and meticulously, never satisfied with the quality of what she had done and always feeling, as she told A. R. Orage, that 'there is not one that I dare show to God.' She could not read anything she had written without feeling self-contempt. For her matter in these days of intellectual poverty and withdrawal from the world she turned to the treasured memories of her childhood, from which she wrought finely polished gems of prose and verse. Her own most exacting critic, she sent back to the crucible again and again; and when she died she begged her husband to 'tear up and burn as much as possible. He will understand that I desire to leave as few traces of my camping ground here as possible.' As her strength failed and she had to remain an invalid she wrote that she was 'dying of the poverty of life ... I am tired of my little stories, like birds bred in cages.' She and Murry were married on 30 Apr 1918. She died at Fontainebleau on 9 Jan 1923, already at the age of 35 the best known and most highly esteemed of New Zealand writers.

Much of Katherine Mansfield's best work was done for the periodical press, notably the Athenaeum and the Adelphi. Collections were published at different times, of which the most noteworthy are Prelude (1918), Je ne Parle pas Francais (1919), Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923), Something Childish (1924), The Aloe (1930). Her collected Poems were published in 1923; her Journals (edited by Murry) in 1927; her Letters in the following year, and a volume of reviews, Novels and Novelists, in 1930. The Aloe was an early draft of Prelude. A bibliography of Katherine Mansfield's work, by Ruth E. Mantz, appeared in 1931; and a Life, by Miss Mantz and J. Middleton Murry, in 1933. In 1921 the Femina-Vie Heureuse committee submitted Bliss, in conjunction with Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages and Brett Young's The Black Diamond. Two years later it submitted Prelude.

G. H. Scholefield, chapter in Beauchamp's Reminiscences, 1937; Mantz, op. cit.; D.N.B.; K. Mansfield, Letters and Journals; Annals N.Z. Lit.; Quarterly Review, Nov 1929.

Reference: Volume 2, page 29

🌳 Further sources