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Katherine Mansfield (née Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp) was born on October 14, 1888, in Wellington, New Zealand. She was the middle child of Harold and Annie Beauchamp’s six children. Harold was a businessman whose success multiplied as Mansfield grew up. He served as the director of the Bank of New Zealand for 38 years and was granted knighthood in 1923. Katherine once described her father as “the richest man in New Zealand, and the meanest.” Mansfield’s mother, Annie, was refined and delicate. She lived a busy social life among the wealthy. She and her daughters often hosted house concerts that were praised in the society columns of Wellington’s newspapers. The family’s wealth and social status greatly influenced Mansfield’s works.
In 1903, Mansfield traveled to England and enrolled with her two older sisters at Queens College in London. She published many short stories in the Queens College Magazine. In the stories, Mansfield wrote about alienation, death, and her New Zealand childhood. She would return to these themes throughout her career.
Mansfield made a short-lived return to New Zealand late in 1906. She described the social life of “perpetual Society functions” as “the waste of life.” After having lived in England, she viewed New Zealand as too colonial and her family life as restrictive. During this time, she published several stories, using the pen name Katherine Mansfield for the first time. Her modest success convinced her father to allow her to return to England to 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. In early 1909, she married a man she hardly knew and abandoned him on their wedding night. News of this scandalous behavior reached Mansfield’s mother, who traveled to London soon after. Annie delivered her daughter to a small Bavarian spa and then immediately returned to New Zealand. On her return to Wellington, Annie removed her daughter from her will.
Mansfield stayed in Germany for six months, writing satirical sketches of guests at the Bavarian spa. In 1911, she published these sketches in In a German Pension. Back in London, she befriended many prominent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. However, because of her colonial origins and gender, Mansfield often felt like an outsider.
In 1915, Mansfield’s younger brother Leslie visited her in London. They spent the summer reminiscing about their childhoods in New Zealand and making plans to return. Sadly, Leslie was killed later that year, training for service in World War I. The loss of her brother and memories of New Zealand inspired many of Mansfield’s following 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 her best works. On January 9, 1923, in Fontainebleau, France, Mansfield died at the age of 34.
