Katherine Mansfield

Selected Stories. Vol I Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was an internationally acclaimed New Zealand author who revolutionized 20th-century English short-story writing. She died on January 9 1923. Katherine Mansfield was the pen-name of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, she was born 14 October 1888 Wellington, New Zealand and grew up in Thorndon, Wellington, in a family of six children. She left to go to London in 1908 and never returned. However she never lost her ties to the country of her childhood, which became the setting for some of her best known stories, which included 'Prelude' and 'At the Bay'. Mansfield wrote, 'I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened'. She lived by this belief and defied convention in her personal life and in her writing. While living in London she mixed widely with London literary circles. She inspired mixed reactions from other authors of the time; Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of her writing, but the 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 and his wife Frieda. She had a long standing relationship with modernist writer John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married. In December 1917 Mansfield developed pleurisy and was diagnosed as having a spot on the lung which later developed into tuberculosis, Mansfield however refused to enter a sanatorium. On the evening of 9 January 1923 she suffered a fatal haemorrhage in Fontainebleau, France where she had been living and was buried at Avon-Fontainebleau. Mansfield's life and works have inspired biographies, radio and television programs, plays, operatic works and films. Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages.