The life of katherine mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
New Zealand author (–)
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October – 9 January ) 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.
Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality, Christianity, and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in , and she died in France aged
Biography
Early life
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in into a socially prominent Wellington family in Thorndon. Her grandfather Arthur Beauchamp briefly represented the Picton electorate in parliament. Her father Harold Beauchamp became the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted in 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-granduncle was a Victorian artist Charles Robert Leslie.
Mansfield had two elder sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother. In , for health reasons, the B Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp at 11 (later renumbered to 25) Tinakori Road, Thorndon on 14 October The third daughter of Harold and Annie Beauchamp, Mansfield spent her childhood in Wellington where she attended Karori Normal School, Wellington Girls' High School (now known as Wellington Girls' College) and the private Fitzherbert Terrace School. She&#;then travelled to London in with her two older sisters to attend Queen&#;s College. On her return home at the end of , she felt stifled by colonial Wellington and her respectable, upper-class family and longed to escape. A writer from an early age, Mansfield had stories published in newspapers and periodicals while still a teenager. After her time at Queen&#;s College, she was determined to make a career from her writing, especially once her initial dream of becoming a professional cellist was met with disapproval from her parents. In , she convinced her father to let her return to London and left New Zealand in July that year. Mansfield went on to become an internationally acclaimed writer best known for her Modernist short stories. She published three collections of short stories during her lifetime: In a German Pension (), Bliss and Other Stories () and The Garden Party and Other Stories (). She also published poetry and reviews in literary journals. Her work was admired by fellow 20th-century writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Bowen. She spent time living in England, Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland and mixed with many progressive and well-known writers, artists, intellectuals and philosophers. Her journals and letters evoke a passionate individual, dedicated to her craft, whose life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis on 9 January ,&#;aged She is buried in the&#;Cimeti&#;re d'Avon in France.&#;Following her death, her husband John Middleton Murry published two further collections of her short sto Katherine Mansfield caught gonorrhoea at age 21 and tuberculosis a few years later. She was very ill for the last years of her life, when she produced her greatest short stories. When she died in , aged 34, her friend Virginia Woolf declared regretfully that she was now “a rival the less”. Each chapter of Claire Harman’s compelling new biography, All Sorts of Lives, describes one of Mansfield’s stories and places it in the context of the author’s life. Many—including the famous “The Garden Party”—take place in New Zealand, where Mansfield spent her first 15 years. Although she attended school in London, and was close friends with the Bloomsbury group and other prominent English writers, she felt she was an outsider—referring to herself as “the little Colonial”. She was married twice and had numerous affairs with men and women. Some of her fiction was copied almost directly from her own diaries. Her story “An Indiscreet Journey” depicts lovers meeting in the French war zone, and was written just weeks after Mansfield had herself travelled to Paris, disguised under an androgynous haircut and a borrowed coat, to meet one of her own lovers. Mansfield, whose brother died in a training exercise, vented her frustration with writers who ignored the war: “I can’t imagine how after the war these men can pick up the old thread as tho’ it had never been… Id say we have died and lived again.” She was equally critical of herself. While dying, she described her bitterness at having written “only short stories; just short stories”. Compared with some of her contemporaries, Mansfield’s writing has been largely overlooked in the years since her death. But Harman’s book looks to correct that, in part by highlighting her great skill in capturing the small details of life—as Mansfield wrote in her journal, “I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry basket squeaked.” Emily Lawford is commissioning editor at ProspectThe Life of Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
I admit to feeling some relief to have finally finished this book. It was fascinating, but oddly consuming. It felt like it took me an eternity to read, both because the subject matter was far from easy reading, but also because I began it during the holiday period, expecting to have ample time to devote to it, only to instead be frequently busy, snatching time when I could.
Still, at least the reading itself has finished. Having first learned about Mansfield in primary school and been required to read some of her short stories in high school, it was overdue that I make an effort to read more by and about her. Although I was frustrated with her at many points in this biography, she was persistently compelling, and I read the last chapter very slowly, trying to delay her death a little.
Katherine Mansfield and her husband, John Middleton Murry
I do think this is one the best biographies I have read recently, one that dove deep without feeling like it was exploiting its subject. At times I was shocked by the utter lack of sense of Mansfield, many of her friends, and her eventual husband. Mansfield in particular seemed unnervingly self-serving. The only time she seemed to look beyond herself was when her brother died, but that too seemed to be about her, not him.
I bristled slightly when she objected to the way Robert Graves talked about the war. It may not have been to her taste, and that is fine, but this was a man actually experiencing the worst aspects of war, so surely, he has every right to talk it in whatever tone he saw fit? She was in many ways unaffected. With the exception of her brother, who she didn't know that well, she was insulated from most of the practicalities of the war. But as ever, she was able to circle it back to herself.
You may be able to tell that I didn't exactly like Mansfield! She annoyed me often, yet she was fascinating, and she was surrounded by equally fascin Katherine Mansfield ()