Katherine Mansfield | |
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.jpg) Mansfield in 1914 | |
| Born | Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-10-14)14 October 1888 Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand |
| Died | 9 January 1923(1923-01-09) (aged 34) Fontainebleau,Île-de-France, France |
| Occupation | Short-story writer,poet |
| Alma mater | Queen's College, London |
| Period | 1908–1923 |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
| Spouses | |
| Partners |
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| Relatives | Arthur Beauchamp (grandfather) Harold Beauchamp (father) Elizabeth von Arnim (first cousin once removed) |
| Website | |
Official website | |
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (néeBeauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic who was an important figure in themodernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world and have been published in 25 languages.[1]
Born and raised ina house on Tinakori Road in theWellington suburb ofThorndon, Mansfield was the third child in the Beauchamp family. She began school inKarori with her sisters, before attendingWellington Girls' College. The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends withMaata Mahupuku, who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship.[1]
Mansfield wroteshort stories and poetry under a variation of her own name,Katherine Mansfield, which exploredanxiety,sexuality,Christianity, andexistentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend ofD. H. Lawrence,Virginia Woolf,Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of theBloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed withpulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, and she died in France aged 34.
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in 1888 into a socially prominentWellington family inThorndon. Her grandfatherArthur Beauchamp briefly represented thePicton electorate in parliament. Her fatherHarold Beauchamp became the chairman of theBank of New Zealand and was knighted in 1923.[2][3] Her mother was Annie Burnell Beauchamp (née Dyer), whose brother married the daughter ofRichard Seddon. Her extended family included the author CountessElizabeth von Arnim, and her great-granduncle was a Victorian artistCharles Robert Leslie.
Mansfield had two elder sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother.[4][3][5] In 1893, for health reasons, the Beauchamp family moved from Thorndon to the country suburb ofKarori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood. She used some of those memories as an inspiration for the short story "Prelude".[2]
The family returned to Wellington in 1898. Mansfield's first printed stories appeared in theHigh School Reporter and theWellington Girls' High School magazine[2] in 1898 and 1899.[6] Her first formally published story "His Little Friend" appeared the following year in a society magazine,New Zealand Graphic and Ladies Journal.[7]
In 1902, at age 13-14, Mansfield became enamoured ofArnold Trowell, a cellist, but her feelings were for the most part not reciprocated.[8] Mansfield was herself an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father.[2]
She moved to London in 1903, where she attendedQueen's College with her sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed she would take up professionally,[8] but she began contributing to the college newspaper with such dedication that she eventually became its editor.[4][6] She was particularly interested in the works of the FrenchSymbolists andOscar Wilde,[4] and she was appreciated among her peers for her vivacious, charismatic approach to life and work.[6]
Mansfield met fellow student Ida Baker[4] at the college, and they became lifelong friends.[2] They both adopted their mother's maiden names for professional purposes, and Baker became known as LM or Lesley Moore, adopting the name of Lesley in honour of Mansfield's younger brother Leslie.[9][10]
Mansfield travelled in Continental Europe between 1903 and 1906, staying mainly in Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England she returned to New Zealand, and only then began in earnest to write short stories. She had several works published in theNative Companion (Australia), her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her heart set on becoming a professional writer.[6] This was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym K. Mansfield.[8] She rapidly grew weary of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle and of her family, and two years later, headed back to London.[4] Her father sent her an annual allowance of 100 pounds for the rest of her life.[2] In later years, she expressed both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals, but she never was able to return there because of hertuberculosis.[4]
Mansfield had two romantic relationships with women that are notable for their prominence in her journal entries. She continued to have male lovers and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times. Her first same-sex romantic relationship was withMaata Mahupuku (sometimes known as Martha Grace), a wealthy young Māori woman whom she had first met at Miss Swainson's school in Wellington and again in London in 1906. In June 1907, Mansfield wrote:
"I want Maata—I want her as I have had her—terribly. This is unclean I know but true."
Often referring to Maata as Carlotta, Mansfield wrote about her in several short stories. Maata married in 1907, but it is claimed that she sent money to Mansfield in London.[11] The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908. Mansfield professed her adoration for her in her journals.[12]
After having returned to London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into abohemian way of life. She published one story and one poem during her first 15 months there.[6] Mansfield sought out the Trowell family for companionship, and while Arnold was involved with another woman, Mansfield embarked on a passionate affair with his brother Garnet.[8] By early 1909, she had become pregnant by Garnet, but Trowell's parents disapproved of the relationship, and the two broke up. She then hastily entered into a marriage with George Bowden, a teacher of singing 11 years her senior;[13] they were married on 2 March, but she left him the same evening before the marriage could be consummated.[8]
After Mansfield had a brief reunion with Garnet, Mansfield's mother Annie Beauchamp arrived in 1909. She blamed the breakdown of the marriage to Bowden on a lesbian relationship between Mansfield and Baker, and she quickly had her daughter dispatched to the spa town ofBad Wörishofen in Bavaria, where Mansfield miscarried. It is not known whether her mother knew of this miscarriage when she left shortly after arriving in Germany, but she cut Mansfield out of her will.[8]
Mansfield's time in Bavaria had a significant effect on her literary outlook. In particular, she was introduced to the works ofAnton Chekhov. Some biographers accuse her of plagiarizing Chekhov with one of her early short stories.[14] She returned to London in January 1910. She then published more than a dozen articles inAlfred Richard Orage's socialist magazineThe New Age and became a friend and lover ofBeatrice Hastings, who lived with Orage.[15] Her experiences in Germany formed the foundation of her first published collectionIn a German Pension (1911), which she later described as "immature".[8][6]
In 1910, Mansfield submitted a lightweight story toRhythm, a new avant-garde magazine. The piece was rejected by the magazine's editorJohn Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield responded with a tale of murder and mental illness titled "The Woman at the Store".[4] Mansfield was inspired at this time byFauvism.[4][8]
Mansfield and Murry began a relationship in 1911 that culminated in their marriage in 1918, but she left him in 1911 and again in 1913.[16] The characters Gudrun and Gerald in D. H. Lawrence'sWomen in Love are based on Mansfield and Murry.[17]
Charles Granville (sometimes known as Stephen Swift), the publisher ofRhythm, absconded to Europe in October 1912 and left Murry responsible for the debts the magazine had accumulated. Mansfield pledged her father's allowance toward the magazine, but it was discontinued, being reorganised asThe Blue Review in 1913 and folded after three issues.[8] Mansfield and Murry were persuaded by their friendGilbert Cannan to rent a cottage next to his windmill in Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1913 in an attempt to alleviate Mansfield's ill health.[18] The couple moved to Paris in January the following year with the hope that a change of setting would make writing easier for both of them. Mansfield wrote only one story during her time there, "Something Childish But Very Natural", then Murry was recalled to London to declare bankruptcy.[8]
Mansfield had a brief affair with the French writerFrancis Carco in 1914. Her visit to him in Paris in February 1915[8] is retold in her story "An Indiscreet Journey".[4]
Mansfield's life and work were changed by the death of her younger brother Leslie Beauchamp, known as Chummie to his family. In October 1915, he was killed during a grenade training drill while serving with theBritish Expeditionary Force in theYpres Salient, Belgium, aged 21.[19] She began to take refuge in nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand.[20] In a poem describing a dream she had shortly after his death, she wrote:
By the remembered stream my brother stands
Waiting for me with berries in his hands...
"These are my body. Sister, take and eat."[4]
At the beginning of 1917, Mansfield and Murry separated,[4] but he continued to visit her at her apartment.[8] Ida Baker, whom Mansfield often called, with a mixture of affection and disdain, her "wife", moved in with her shortly afterwards.[13] Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing after 1916, which began with several stories, including "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" and "A Dill Pickle", being published inThe New Age.Virginia Woolf and her husbandLeonard, who had recently set up theHogarth Press, approached her for a story, and Mansfield presented to them "Prelude", which she had begun writing in 1915 as "The Aloe". The story depicts a New Zealand family, configured like her own,[21] moving house.
In December 1917, at the age of 29, Mansfield was diagnosed withpulmonary tuberculosis.[22] For part of spring and summer 1918, she joined her friendAnne Estelle Rice, an American painter, atLooe inCornwall with the hope of recovering. While there, Rice painted a portrait of her dressed in red, a vibrant colour that Mansfield liked and suggested herself. ThePortrait of Katherine Mansfield is now held by theMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.[23]
Rejecting the idea of staying in a sanatorium on the grounds that it would cut her off from writing,[6] she moved abroad to avoid the English winter.[8] She stayed at a half-deserted, cold hotel inBandol, France, where she became depressed but continued to produce stories, including "Je ne parle pas français". "Bliss", the story that lent its name to her second collection of stories in 1920, was also published in 1918. Her health continued to deteriorate and she had her first lunghaemorrhage in March.[8]
By April, Mansfield's divorce from Bowden had been finalised, and she and Murry married, only to part again two weeks later.[8] They came together again, however, and in March 1919 Murry became editor ofThe Athenaeum, a magazine for which Mansfield wrote more than 100 book reviews (collected posthumously asNovels and Novelists). During the winter of 1918–1919, she and Baker stayed in a villa inSanremo, Italy. Their relationship came under strain during this period; after she wrote to Murry to express her feelings of depression, he stayed over Christmas.[8] Although her relationship with Murry became increasingly distant after 1918[8] and the two often lived apart,[16] this intervention of his spurred her, and she wrote "The Man Without a Temperament", the story of an ill wife and her long-suffering husband. Mansfield followedBliss (1920), her first collection of short stories, with the collectionThe Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922.
In May 1921, Mansfield, accompanied by her friend Ida Baker, travelled to Switzerland to investigate the tuberculosis treatment of the Swiss bacteriologist Henri Spahlinge. From June 1921, Murry joined her, and they rented the Chalet des Sapins in the Montana region (nowCrans-Montana) until January 1922. Baker rented separate accommodation in Montana village and worked at a clinic there.[8] The Chalet des Sapins was only a "1/2 an hours scramble away" from the Chalet Soleil at Randogne, the home of Mansfield's first cousin once removed, the Australian-born writerElizabeth von Arnim, who visited Mansfield and Murry often during this period.[24] Von Arnim was the first cousin of Mansfield's father. They got on well, although Mansfield considered her wealthier cousin—who had in 1919 separated from her second husbandFrank Russell, the elder brother ofBertrand Russell—to be rather patronising.[25] It was a highly productive period of Mansfield's writing, for she felt she did not have much time left. "At the Bay", "The Doll's House", "The Garden Party" and "A Cup of Tea" were written in Switzerland.[26]
Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. In February 1922, she went to Paris to have a controversial X-ray treatment from the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin. The treatment was expensive and caused unpleasant side effects without improving her condition.[8]
From 4 June to 16 August 1922, Mansfield and Murry returned to Switzerland, living in a hotel in Randogne. Mansfield finished "The Canary", the last short story she completed, on 7 July 1922. She wrote her will at the hotel on 14 August 1922. They went to London for six weeks before Mansfield, along with Ida Baker, moved toFontainebleau, France, on 16 October 1922.[26][8]
At Fontainebleau, Mansfield lived atG. I. Gurdjieff'sInstitute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where she was put under the care ofOlgivanna Lazovitch Hinzenburg (who later marriedFrank Lloyd Wright). As a guest rather than a pupil of Gurdjieff, Mansfield was not required to take part in the rigorous routine of the institute,[27] but she spent much of her time there with her mentorAlfred Richard Orage, and her last letters inform Murry of her attempts to apply some of Gurdjieff's teachings to her own life.[28]
Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary haemorrhage on 9 January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs.[29] She died within the hour, and was buried at Cimetière d'Avon,Avon, near Fontainebleau.[30] Because Murry forgot to pay for her funeral expenses, she initially was buried in a pauper's grave; when matters were rectified, her casket was moved to its current resting place.[31]
Mansfield was a prolific writer in the final years of her life. Much of her work remained unpublished at her death, and Murry took on the task of editing and publishing it in two additional volumes of short stories (The Doves' Nest in 1923, andSomething Childish in 1924); a volume of poems;The Aloe;Novels and Novelists; and collections of her letters and journals.
The following high schools in New Zealand have ahouse named after Mansfield:Whangārei Girls' High School;Rangitoto College,Westlake Girls High School, andMacleans College in Auckland;Tauranga Girls' College;Wellington Girls' College;Rangiora High School in North Canterbury, New Zealand;Avonside Girls' High School in Christchurch; andSouthland Girls' High School in Invercargill. She has also been honoured at Karori Normal School in Wellington, which has a stone monument dedicated to her with a plaque commemorating her work and her time at the school, and atSamuel Marsden Collegiate School (previously Fitzherbert Terrace School) with a painting, and an award in her name.
Her birthplace inThorndon has been preserved as theKatherine Mansfield House and Garden, and the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park in Fitzherbert Terrace is dedicated to her.
There is the Résidence le Prieuré, Rue Katherine Mansfield in Avon/Fontainebleau, very near to the former monastery, the G. I. Gurdjieff's Institute, that is the place where she died. A street inMenton, France, where she lived and wrote, is named after her.[32] An award, theKatherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship is offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at her former home, the Villa Isola Bella. New Zealand's pre-eminent short story competition is named in her honour.[33]
Archives of Mansfield material are held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in theNational Library of New Zealand in Wellington, with other important holdings at theNewberry Library in Chicago, theHarry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin and theBritish Library in London. There are smaller holdings atNew York Public Library and other public and private collections.[8] Mansfield's literary and personal papers and belongings at the Alexander Turnbull Library were added to theUNESCOMemory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register in 2015.[34]
TheSapphic sensibilities of Mansfield's writing and the documentation of long-term female companionships have supported modern readings of Mansfield as an important part of queer history in New Zealand.[35][36][37][38]
J. M. Murry wrote inReminiscences of D. H. Lawrence (1933): "I have been told, by one who should know, that the character of Gudrun inWomen in Love was intended for a portrait of Katherine [Mansfield]. If this is true, it confirms me in my belief thatLawrence had curiously little understanding of her... And yet he was very fond of her, as she was of him."[45]: 88 Murry said that the fictional incident in the chapter "Gudrun in the Pompadour" – when Gudrun tears a letter from Julian Halliday's hands and storms out – was based on a true event at theCafé Royal.[45]: 89–90
The character Sybil in the 1932 novelBut for the Grace of God, by Mansfield's friendJ. W. N. Sullivan, has several resemblances to Mansfield. Musically trained, she goes to the south of France without her husband but with a female friend, and lapses into an incurable illness that kills her.[46]
The character Kathleen inEvelyn Schlag's 1987 novelDie Kränkung (published in English asQuotations of a Body) is based on Mansfield.[47]
C. K. Stead's 2004 novelMansfield depicts the writer in the period 1915-18.[48]
Kevin Boon's 2011 novellaKezia is based on Mansfield's childhood in New Zealand.[49]
Andrew Crumey's 2023 novelBeethoven's Assassins has a chapter featuring Mansfield andA. R. Orage atGeorge Gurdjieff's institute in France.[50]
Quotations related toKatherine Mansfield at Wikiquote
Works by or aboutKatherine Mansfield atWikisource
Media related toKatherine Mansfield at Wikimedia Commons
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