Katherine Mansfield reshaped the short story and died at just 34
A banker's daughter from Wellington, Katherine Mansfield trained as a cellist, fled to London at 19 and became a key modernist voice. Tuberculosis struck in 1917. In the five years left to her she wrote her finest stories, and her work now circulates in 25 languages.
Born Kathleen Beauchamp on 14 October 1888 in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon, she was the third child of Harold Beauchamp, later chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. Her happiest childhood years were spent in rural Karori, memories she later poured into the story "Prelude". Her first stories appeared in school magazines in 1898 and 1899, and "His Little Friend" followed in a society journal. In London she studied at Queen's College, edited its paper and met Ida Baker, who stayed devoted to her for life.
Back in New Zealand she first signed herself K. Mansfield and sold work to the Australian Native Companion, but the provincial life bored her and she returned to London, living on a yearly allowance of 100 pounds from her father. Her private life was turbulent: a pregnancy by Garnet Trowell, a marriage to the singing teacher George Bowden that she abandoned on the wedding night in 1909, and a miscarriage in Bavaria. That German stay introduced her to Chekhov and supplied the material for In a German Pension (1911), a book she later dismissed as immature.
Editor John Middleton Murry rejected her first submission to Rhythm and asked for something darker; she answered with "The Woman at the Store", a tale of murder and madness. The pair began a stormy relationship in 1911 and married in 1918, and D. H. Lawrence modelled Gudrun and Gerald in Women in Love on them. The death of her brother Leslie in a grenade drill near Ypres in 1915 turned her writing back toward their New Zealand childhood.
Diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in December 1917, she refused a sanatorium because it would stop her writing and chased warmer winters in Bandol and Sanremo. Virginia and Leonard Woolf published "Prelude" at the Hogarth Press; the collections Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) followed, alongside more than 100 book reviews for The Athenaeum. She died in France on 9 January 1923.
Source: Katherine Mansfield
