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Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp on October 14, 1888, in a small house in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father, Harold, was a businessman whose success multiplied as she grew up. The family’s wealth and social status greatly influenced Mansfield’s works.
Mansfield published her first story, “Enna Blake,” in the Wellington Girls School newspaper. The paper’s editor wrote that she showed “promise of great merit.” In 1903, Mansfield traveled with her family to England and enrolled with her two older sisters at Queens College in London as boarders. There she read influential works by writers such as Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. She published many short stories in the Queens College Magazine. During her career, Mansfield would return repeatedly to the themes in these stories: alienation, death, and her childhood.
Katherine returned to New Zealand late in 1906. She found the social life of “perpetual Society functions” to be “the waste of life.” Having lived in England, she now viewed New Zealand as too colonial and longed to leave. She continued writing, publishing several stories in an Australian literary magazine under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. Her modest success convinced her father to allow her to return to England and pursue a career in writing. In 1908, at age 19, Mansfield sailed from New Zealand, never to return.
At first, Mansfield had trouble earning a living as a writer. She traveled to Germany, and during a six-month stay, she published several sketches that humorously described Germans from the perspective of a foreign observer. In 1911, they became her first published collection, In a German Pension. Back in England that year, she met John Middleton Murry, an editor and publisher. The two had an on-again, off-again relationship, marrying seven years later. The couple befriended English writer D. H. Lawrence. They also associated with the Bloomsbury group, a circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals, whose ranks included T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. Mansfield was treated as somewhat of an outsider by the group, owing to her colonial origins and gender. She and Woolf became friends and rivals. Each envied the other’s talents, and they praised and criticized each other’s works.
In 1915, Mansfield’s brother Leslie visited her in London. They spent the summer reminiscing about their childhood in New Zealand and making plans to return. Leslie was killed later that year while training for service in World War I. This loss and her memories of New Zealand inspired many of Mansfield’s next works, including two of her most famous short stories, “Bliss” (1918) and “The Garden Party” (1920).
In late 1917, Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She feared dying with her work unfinished. Mansfield spent the next five years in ill health, writing while traveling between England and Europe in search of cures and favorable weather. On January 9, 1923, in Fontainebleau, France, Mansfield suffered a massive hemorrhage and died at the age of 34.
