Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (born Katherine Beauchamp) was born into a wealthy, socially-connected New Zealand family that included her grandfather Arthur Beauchamp, a Member of New Zealand Parliament, her father Harold Beauchamp, a prominent New Zealand banker, and the novelist Elizabeth von Armin, her cousin and an acclaimed modernist writer in her own right. However, life in the Beauchamp family was often unstable: Katherine and her four siblings moved around New Zealand in childhood, interacting frequently with the native Maori people (Mansfield is known for her sympathetic depictions of Maori characters in her fiction). Eventually, Beauchamp moved to London to attend Queen’s College, later returning to New Zealand in the first few years of the twentieth century, when she began to write the short stories that would make her famous. She took the pseudonym “K. Mansfield,” then returned to London, where she became embedded in the avant-garde literary scene. Mansfield began a relationship with John Middleton Murry, the editor of Rhythm, a “little magazine” highlighting literature and the arts. Among the many tragedies in Mansfield’s life—she miscarried a child in 1909 and struggled with her attraction to and affairs with women—none was as influential as the death of her younger brother Leslie Beauchamp, a soldier in France during World War I. Mansfield wrote voraciously after Leslie’s death, compelled by this trauma to reflect on her childhood in New Zealand with her siblings. In 1916, the Hogarth Press, led by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published one of her most well-known stories, a semi-autobiographical narrative entitled “Prelude” about a New Zealand family. Mansfield died of causes related to tuberculosis in 1923, though her diagnosis did not prevent her from producing a number of acclaimed works in her last years, including two collections of short stories (Bliss and The Garden Party). Mansfield is remembered as a stalwart of avant-garde modernism and a keen observer of modern strife and fragmentation. Her stories variously approach issues of sexuality, familial relationships, and class and gender hierarchies with shrewd insight.