Death of Katherine Mansfield

This internationally acclaimed author revolutionised 20th-century English short-story writing. Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages. She died from tuberculosis in France at the age of 34.

Katherine Mansfield was the pen-name of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, daughter of successful Wellington businessman Harold Beauchamp. Mansfield grew up in Thorndon and the country village of Karori. Finding New Zealand too provincial, she sailed to London in 1908 and never returned. But she never lost her ties to the country of her childhood, which became the setting for some of her best-known stories, including ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’.

Mansfield once wrote, ‘I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened’. She lived by this creed, defying convention in her personal life and in her writing. Her short stories broke new ground, abandoning traditional concepts of plot and sending the reader on a journey through different narratives, perspectives and tenses.

As a colonial writer, Mansfield remained on the fringes of London literary circles. She inspired mixed reactions – cultural weathervane Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of her writing, but the modernist poet T.S. Eliot described her as ‘a thick-skinned toady’ and ‘a dangerous woman’. She had a long friendship with the novelist D.H. Lawrence, but after they fell out he called her ‘a loathsome reptile’.

The love of her life was the editor and modernist writer John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married. Forming an identity as ‘the two tigers’, the pair set out to challenge the literary establishment. ‘Tig’ and ‘Wig’, as they called each other, had a stormy on-off relationship for the rest of Mansfield’s life. After her death, Murry prepared her remaining writings for publication, a labour of love that did much for her international reputation.

Mansfield’s output was small: five collections of stories, as well as reviews, journals, letters and poems. But her life and works have inspired biographies, radio and television programmes, plays, operatic works and films. The house in Thorndon where she was born has been restored and is one of New Zealand’s most-visited heritage sites.

Image: Katherine Mansfield at her work table in Menton (ATL)