katherine mansfield short biography

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Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield is considered the most talented modern short story writer in English. She is regarded as the pioneer of avant-gardism in the short story. Her writing is psychologically acute, accessible, and innovative. There is clarity and precision in her language. She has a resonant and distilled reaction to the experience. 

She is considered a seminal modernist, and her works are regarded in great esteem. She was able to reach a wide range of audiences because of the brevity of the genre she wrote in, its variety, and accessibility. She had developed a distinctive prose style. Her style had overtones of poetry. Her writing has the influence of Anton Chekhov, which can be seen in the subtlety of observation, in her obliqueness in narration, and delicacy of her stories. Her role in the development of the short story as a form of literature is undeniable.

Her short stories cover a wide range of thematic topics. These topics range from problems and difficulties in families, vulnerable and fragile nature of relationships, rising middle class, and its complexes, and the numbness related to them. Other themes include the extraction of life and energy from ordinary, mundane experiences, and the consequences of war faced by society, etc. 

She was contemporary of great writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and like them, she plays her role in the evolution of the short story. She helped redefine the genre by doing experiments with the genre, themes, and subject matter. She had a prolific career during which she wrote journals, reviews, letters, etc. Her role as a significant modernist writer was recognized after the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s.

She was a close friend and literary rival of Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf envied her skill as well as the audience that was attracted by her short stories. In sharp contrast to Woolf, Mansfield had an amorphous economic, social, sexual experience that was disapproved by Virginia Woolf. This relationship was not only based on envy; rather, Woolf respected her and communicated with her to learn from her. At her death, Woolf wrote in her diary that Katherine was the only person from whose writing she was jealous.

In her works, she questioned the nature of reality, challenged the certainties. She changed the underpinned facts of Victorian literature and replaced them with modernist attributes. In her works, we see a crucial role of gender where the story is presented from the male perspective while the values are of the female side. Her works focus on the marginalized of society. 

Shortly, her works are concrete, which communicates moods, transient emotions, and impressions, and these make her works seminal.

A Short Biography of Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was the pen name of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. She was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14 th , 1888. She belonged to a socially and commercially active family. Her father was born to a successful business family in Australia while her mother also belonged to a prosperous family. Both her parents had migrated from Australia to New Zealand. Her father had investments in business companies, insurances, and banks. She was the third child of her parents.

Her family was an English family whose previous generation had migrated to Australia for better financial prospects. She was the comparatively ignored child and spent most of her time with her maternal grandmother, who lived with her parents. She was a gifted child and wrote for her school magazines and other journals. At the age of nine, her first short story, Enna Blake , was published in The High School Reporter .

She was described by her relatives as kind of surly, an overly imaginative girl, and inquisitive in many matters. She was one of the founding members of her school magazine, wrote the most part of it, and edited it. She was admitted to Queen’s College in Harley Street, London. There she developed her interest in music, liberal arts, and languages. Her relations with her parents were not ideal, and for this reason, she didn’t visit them and spent most of her time in Britain. Her mother was weary of her homosexual tendencies.

She had peculiar sexual tendencies and was attracted to both men and women. Ida Baker was her friend and lifelong partner with whom she had intimate relations. Her first marriage was with George Brown in 1909, which ended soon in few days because they couldn’t go along. She had an affair with Garnett Trowell, and with him, she had become pregnant. Her first collection was In a German Pension , which was published in 1911.

During this time, she also had a relationship with George Bowden, which resulted later in marriage and separation in 1918. Due to her relationship, she was disinherited by her mother, and this led to the hard financial crisis in her life. She had a relationship with Floryan Sobieniowski in Germany, and from him, she contracted a sexually transmitted disease. This disease caused her much trouble later and was the reason for her weakness for the rest of her life.  

She met John Middleton Murry in 1911 and married him in 1918. In 1916, he and Katherine met a lady, Ottoline Morrel, and she introduced her to great writers of the day like Virginia Woolf, Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russel, etc. She visited the front of France during World War I to visit her new lover Francis Carco who was a writer.  She was diagnosed with tuberculosis the same year. Her second collection of short stories, Bliss and Other Stories , was published in 1922.

In her last days, she was admitted to Gurdjieff Institute in France due to pulmonary problems. She died of pulmonary hemorrhage in the same hospital on January 9 th , 1923.

Katherine Mansfield’s Writing Style

Katherine’s first collection of short stories is based on sketches where she describes the coarseness and grossness of Germans. Sketches were then popular in journals, and she followed this trend. They described a specific segment of life and had no sufficient theme or plot development. Later changes came to her work as in other short stories; she traversed different topics and themes.

Her short stories are about everyday concerns. They are descriptive, full of imagery, metaphors, and symbols. The characters that she has featured are sensitive and warm-hearted. She wants to make the reader see through the descriptions what she wants to convey and feel a part of it. The descriptions in her short stories are vivid, which covers the minutest details. In her stories, there is a narrative presentation with an element of dialogue.

In her works, there are imperatives, questions, polite requests, exclamations, etc. which show the variety in characters. The language of her short stories is expressive and emotional, and simple. Her works interest the reader through their explorations of psychological detail.

Modernist Short Story

Mansfield made a short story a psychological sketch. This genre was considered by many readers and critics as a useless genre. She used it as the ex-centric vehicle of expression, and the estranged vision of women. She didn’t completely reject the conventions of short story writing rather made amends to the form. In conformity to literary modernism, she rejected conventional dramatic action and plot structure in favor of the character.

She retains her distinction from other modernists by not completely following the modernist tenets. Typical modernist issues like anomie, guilt, anxiety are not her only concerns. She has sardonic comments about sophistication. There are not only internal problems of mind, rather the common life problems as well, such as unhappiness, poverty, etc. shown in her works like Life of Ma Parker , Pictures .

There is a spiritual search in her work and a longing to return to the world of childhood, which added new dimensions to the modernist short story.

Narrative Technique

She was a professional, lifetime writer. Her narrative technique has several elements. Her short stories develop with the passage of time into slices of life. She offers miniatures which present an aspect of life true in the case of whole life. Her stories are apparently simple, but on the internal level, there are subversive attitudes and themes. There is mention of the ‘unmentionable’ aspects of life which are hidden in her carefully chosen lexicon.

These ironically subversive themes cover the criticism of conventional relationships, small-mindedness, and prejudice. There are some characters who narrate the interior monologue in a single text. She develops an appropriate narrative strategy and a distinctive voice for each character. She had a gift for impersonation, which relates to her experience as an actress.

She uses many grammatical devices that include exclamation, rhetorical question, the unfinished sentence, abrupt shift in syntax, etc. Her short stories in different collections abound with these features.

Dramatic Techniques

‘Nouvelle-instant’ or commonly known as ‘slices of life,’ is her most common dramatic technique that she uses in her works. It is the technique in which the action is brief and occupies a few moments. In her first collection, German Pension , she uses this technique in nine out of thirteen stories. This hallmark technique is further strengthened in her later works, where it is used in 12 stories in Bliss , 14 in The Garden Party , 5 in The Dove’s Nest , and 8 in Something Childish .  

This technique is divided further into two types, which include habitual and unique moments. The former type refers to happenings that are usual while the later to the happenings taking place once in life. ‘In medias res’ is another technique that she uses in her works; this is the reference to the foreknowledge of happenings. In longer stories like The Prelude , At the Bay , etc. she has made divisions based on scenes.  

The Epiphanic Moment

She refers to this moment as the ‘blazing moment,’ and it is related to the idea of ‘nouvelle-instant.’ Epiphany has the power to emphasize the unattractive reality which underlies human feelings. This technique is prominent in her short story Bliss . In this short story behind the sense of bliss, there are uncomfortable feelings of self-discovery. In Bliss , the protagonist and her husband have an epiphany at two different moments. They come to realize that they will not be there, but the tree that is there will remain even after them.

Another example is from her short story, At the Bay . In this work, the protagonist recognizes that the person she is flirting with is a womanizer. There is a profound realization in Mansfield’s epiphanic moments. It is not necessarily understood by the characters but is clearly perceived by the reader.

Literary Impressionism

Katherine Mansfield was greatly influenced by post-impressionist art. This impressionistic technique she transposed in her own literary works. This technique was employed in Literature with Naturalism. It was an attempt to present things with minimum efforts. Bates notes that it was the view that if a woman can be presented through her hands, then there is no need to portray the complete picture. Mansfield was the first writer who shaped it as a suitable technique to be used in a short story.

She prefers vignette to complete description, has a preoccupation with color, and lays emphasis on reflections and surfaces. She used these to alter perceptions; there is transition seen from present to past, to future. This is used as a metaphorical threshold, which helps in realization. A significant example is from The Tiredness of Rosabell , where a mirror is used to realize the harsh reality and even dream a fairy-tale scenario. Her short story Bank Holiday is an example which is wholly an example of a vignette. 

Incorporation of Symbolism

Mansfield had accepted influences from French Symbolist and Decadent movements. She, like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Symons is of the view that instead of descriptive analysis of abstract states of mind, concrete images should be used. Her symbolist work is essentially poetic and metaphorical in nature. One story in which this notion is signified is Miss Brill. These symbols are considered a powerful tool through which the reader is encouraged to discover the character’s development.

Flowers are used as a symbol in her short story The Garden Party , which represents sexuality. These are indicative of the end of innocence, and the corrupting effect on the characters. In Prelude and At the Bay , she uses the aloe plant as a symbol. It carries with itself a sense of mystery, troubles, and childlike concerns in the real world. It also signifies pains and intimidating fears of a lifetime. 

Use of Humor

In Mansfield’s short stories, there is the frequent use of humor noticed. She, through her use of psychological subtlety and narrative art and metaphorical flair, produces the effect of humor by capturing the nuances of consciousness. In her life, Katherine was known for being an amusing companion, and the same is seen in her literary works. It was her devotion to Oscar Wilde that perfected this art. 

Sarcastic and brittle comedic examples of her humor can be seen in her short story Bliss . In this story, two characters talk about tomato soup and its presence everywhere; the reason that is told for its presence is being eternal.

Her humor is a satire on the pseudo-intellectuals who say things that are of no value. She mimics the dandified tone of upper-class society. She mocks the depiction of grandiose by the use of ‘affected’ idiolects. An example of it is the ridiculous accent of Nurse Andrews from The Daughters of the Late Colonel . His snobbish character is known in few humorous sentences which wouldn’t have been done in long descriptions. 

Sun, Moon, and Sea Imagery

In her last works, Mansfield used esoteric imagery to describe the ironic self-discovery. She has a feminine approach as she presents her subconscious understanding of the universe through recurring symbols. In her work, the imagery of the moon is allied to mysterious and feminine. Sun is associated with the masculine.

She read a book Cosmic Anatomy on the Structure of Ego a year before death. This had a great influence on her because she took the notions of the opposition of sun and moon from this, which she used in her works. Under the influence of this book, she wrote the story Sun and Moon . It was written in 1918 and represented Blake’s concepts of beauty and innocence. This short story is considered a masterpiece of ironic exposé.

Sea is also used as a feminine symbol in her works. It is considered a feminine response which is allied to the moon. It is used in her work At the Bay , where it is employed to show Beryl’s moment of epiphany.     

Feminist Issues as a Theme

In her works, feminist issues are presented as a recurring motif. She exhibits the discontinuity between male and female experiences. There is a feminist awareness running throughout her works. Though she was not an open suffragette, her works talk about the problems that are faced by feminine gender. Her earlier critics were unable to discern feminist issues in her works. If her works are deeply analyzed, there are two recurring themes in her every work, viz. money, and love.

An example of her story with feminist issues is the Life of Ma Parker . She considers money as a source of independence; if a woman is deprived of money, then it is an attempt to deprive her of freedom. In her other stories, there is a harsh polemic about a lot of women.

Works Of Katherine Mansfield

Short stories.

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Images above: The Beauchamp children c.1898.  Alexander Turnbull Library, PAColl-4488 ;

Katherine Mansfield 1914.  Alexander Turnbull Library, 1/4-017274-F .

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp at 11 (later renumbered to 25) Tinakori Road, Thorndon on 14 October 1888.

The third daughter of Harold and Annie Beauchamp , Mansfield spent her childhood in Wellington where she attended Karori Normal School, Wellington Girls' High School (now known as Wellington Girls' College) and the private Fitzherbert Terrace School. She then travelled to London in 1903 with her two older sisters to attend Queen’s College. On her return home at the end of 1906, she felt stifled by colonial Wellington and her respectable, upper-class family and longed to escape.

A writer from an early age, Mansfield had stories published in newspapers and periodicals while still a teenager. After her time at Queen’s College, she was determined to make a career from her writing, especially once her initial dream of becoming a professional cellist was met with disapproval from her parents. In 1908, she convinced her father to let her return to London and left New Zealand in July that year.

Mansfield went on to become an internationally acclaimed writer best known for her Modernist short stories. She published three collections of short stories during her lifetime: In a German Pension (1911), Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). She also published poetry and reviews in literary journals. Her work was admired by fellow 20th-century writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Bowen. She spent time living in England, Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland and mixed with many progressive and well-known writers, artists, intellectuals and philosophers.

Her journals and letters evoke a passionate individual, dedicated to her craft, whose life was tragically cut short by tuberculosis on 9 January 1923, aged 34. She is buried in the Cimetière d'Avon in France. Following her death, her husband John Middleton Murry published two further collections of her short stories, The Dove's Nest and Other Stories (1923) and Something Childish and Other Stories (1924), as well as excerpts from her journals and selected letters. 

The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry on Mansfield offers an excellent overview of her life, as does this 50-minute documentary A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield made in 1986 and available online in full through NZ On Screen. Many of her stories can also be found online . 

Research Resources

If you're researching Katherine Mansfield, you may find the following resources useful.

Katherine Mansfield Researchers' Guide  - National Library of New Zealand, 2019. This guide has been designed to help with researching Katherine Mansfield and includes an overview of Mansfield items held in the Alexander Turnbull Library and National Library collections.

Katherine Mansfield's Stories Online

Many of Katherine Mansfield's short story collections can be found online through the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Click on the title below to access the 'Contents' page of each collection. Once you're on the 'Contents' page, click on a page number, the story title, or one of the '+' symbols to go to a particular story, or click 'next section' to start on the first page and continue on through the pages of the online book:

• In A German Pension  (1911)
• Bliss and Other Stories (1920)
• The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)

Some popular individual ‘New Zealand’ stories you might like to start with are listed below, click on the title of the story to access it:

• ‘The Woman at the Store’ (1912)
• ‘Millie’ (1913)
• ‘The Wind Blows’ (1915)
• ‘Prelude’ (1917) A longer story that begins with the Burnell family moving to Karori and includes a description of what is believed to be the house at 25 Tinakori Road
• ‘The Doll’s House’ (1921)
• ‘The Garden Party’ (1921)
• ‘Her First Ball’ (1921)
• ‘At the Bay’ (1921) Another longer story about the Burnell family, set across the harbour from Wellington city at Days Bay/Eastbourne

More individual stories can be found on the Katherine Mansfield Society's website  here .

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October 14, 1888 Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp is born to Annie Dyer and Harold Beauchamp, residing at 11 Tinakori Rd, Wellington, New Zealand, “a little land with no history.” She will be one of six children.

1895 Begins school at Karori village school.

1898 Attends Wellington Girls’ High School. Publishes first work in High School Reporter.

1899 Transfers to Miss Swainson’s school where she meets Maori princess Maata Mahupuku, later remembered in novel fragment, “Maata.” KM described by teacher as “surly” and “imaginative to the point of untruth.”

1902 Frequents the musical Trowell family. Falls in love with Tom (Arnold) Trowell, cellist, whom she calls “Caesar.” Dreams of pursuing a musical career.

January 29, 1903 The Beauchamps sail to England on the S.S Niwaru. The trip lasts forty-two days.

1903 – June 1906 Enrolls with sisters Vera and Chaddie at Queen’s College, Harley Street to be “finished.” Develops friendship with Ida Constance Baker. Adopts the name “Katherine Mansfield,” while Ida becomes “Lesley Moore”. Meets first literary mentor, Walter Rippmann, German teacher. Discovers the work of Oscar Wilde. Publishes five stories in school magazine and becomes its editor. Completes studies at Queen’s College in June. Works on novel fragment “Juliet”. KM’s period at Queen’s College is recorded in Ida Baker’s memoirs, The Memories of LM.

December 1906 – June 1908 Returns with sisters to New Zealand but cannot adjust. Friendship with Edie Bendall recorded in diary. Publishes three stories “Vignettes,” “Silhouettes,” and ” In a Café” in Australian newspaper, Native Companion. Takes a camping trip to visit the hinterland of New Zealand at the insistence of her father. Writes “The Education of Audrey,” heavily influenced by Oscar Wilde.

July 6, 1908 Leaves New Zealand for England aboard the Papanui never to return.

Summer 1908 Resides at student hostel, Beauchamp Lodge, near the canal at Paddington. Receives from family a weekly allowance of forty shillings: thirty for the rent and ten for the rest.

Autumn – Winter 1908 Reconnects with the Trowell family now in London. Transfers her feelings to Tom’s twin brother, Garnet, a violinist. Becomes pregnant by Garnet.

January 1909 Publishes “The Education of Audrey” in the Evening Post. Begins to find a mature voice with her story “The Tiredness of Rosabel”.

March 2, 1909 Marries George Bowden, singing and elocution teacher, ten years her senior, at the Paddington Registry Office. Wears black to her wedding with Ida as only witness. Leaves Bowden immediately afterwards. Bowden later caricatured in “Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day”, Nine years pass before their divorce.

May 1909 Disapproving of KM’s attachment to Ida, Annie Beauchamp takes her daughter to Bad Worishofen, Bavaria and leaves her there, probably unaware that she is pregnant. Experiences here provide material for her first collection In a German Pension.

Late June 1909(?) Has a miscarriage

Summer 1909 Romantic involvement with Floryan Sobieniowski, Polish critic and translator through whom she discovers Chekhov and new Russian literature. Writes “The Child Who Was Tired” borrowing a plot from Chekhov. May have contracted gonorrhea from Floryan with whom she plans to run away to Paris.

January 1910 Returns to London, residing at the Strand Palace Hotel. Floryan eagerly awaits her in Paris, but she ends their affair.

Late Winter 1910 Lives briefly with George Bowden. Meets Alfred Richard Orage, editor of The New Age, future pupil of G.I. Gurdjieff . Publishes “The Child Who Was Tired” in The New Age. Will later credit Orage as being the person who “taught her how to write.”

March 1910 After an attack of peritonitis, undergoes operation to remove infected Fallopian tube. Ida nurses her back to health at Rottingdean.

Summer 1910 Befriended by Orage and his mistress, South African writer, Beatrice Hastings, caustic critic for the New Age, future lover and model of Amedeo Modigliani. House-sits a flat in Cheyne Walk. Becomes friends with William Orton with whom she keeps a journal. Orton will depict her in his autobiographical novel, The Last Romantic, which includes passages apparently written by KM.

November 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition opens in London, with works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse. KM will be among the many visitors.

January 1911 Moves to 69 Clovelly Mansions in Gray’s Inn Road.

Spring 1911 May have been pregnant again. Ida Baker recounts the episode in The Memories of LM

June 22, 1911 Coronation of George V attended by the Beauchamp family with whom she is reunited. Re-establishes ties with younger brother Leslie, “Chummie”.

December 1911 Publication of In a German Pension. Submits “The Woman at the Store,” New Zealand murder story to Rhythm, avant-garde magazine edited by John Middleton Murry. Meets Murry at dinner party organized by W.L. George.

April 1912 Murry moves in as KM’s lodger at 69 Clovelly Mansions, occupying “the Buddha room” at 7s.6d a month. This period is vividly described in Murry’s autobiography, Between Two Worlds.

Spring 1912 Becomes assistant editor of Rhythm. Attacked by Hastings and Orage in The New Age.

August 1912 Forced with Murry to leave Clovelly Mansions because they are not married

September 1912 Moves with Murry to Runcton Cottage near Chichester. Quarrel with Henri Gaudier and Sophie Brzeska. Receives uninvited guest, Floryan Sobieniowski.

October 1912 The publisher of Rhythm goes bankrupt. KM pledges annual income from her father to pay back a printer’s debt for four years.

Moves with Murry back to London to dreary digs in Chancery Lane, furnished with a camp bed, two chairs, and a packing case. They struggle to keep the magazine afloat. Contributors include Hugh Walpole and DH Lawrence.

Christmas 1912 Spends Christmas in Paris with Murry.

March 1913 In need of fresh air, KM rents a house in the country in Buckinghamshire where Murry is to join her on weekends. They find the separation stressful

May 1913 Rhythm becomes the short-lived Blue Review and publishes a story by DH Lawrence, “The Soiled Rose”.

June 1913 Friendship develops with DH Lawrence and Frieda. Murry later describes the foursome swimming naked in a lake and feasting on steak and tomatoes. This relationship will partly provide inspiration for Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love, with KM serving as a model for Gudrun and Murry for Gerald.

July 1913 Moves with Murry to Baron’s Court, described by Ida as “a suburban flatlet with communal gardens at the back.” Murry occupies the study while KM works on the dining table.

November 1913 Completes opening chapters of “Maata”.

December 1913 Moves with Murry to 31 Rue de Tournon, Paris. Is attracted to bohemian writer Francis Carco. Writes “Something Childish but Very Natural”.

February 1914 Leaves Paris with Murry after he is declared bankrupt and returns to London. Carco helps them dispose of their furniture by selling it to brothels. Ida sends money by post, tearing a five-pound note in half and enclosing it in two separate envelopes to make sure it would not be stolen by postal workers.

April 1914 Moves with Murry to Fulham (102 Edith Grove).

July 1914 Moves with Murry to Chelsea (111 Arthur Street)

July 13, 1914 KM and Murry are witnesses at the wedding of DH Lawrence and Frieda.

August 4, 1914 War is declared.

October 1914 – Feb 1915 Moves with Murry to Rose Tree Cottage in Buckinghamshire, close to the Lawrences, whose frequent quarrels create a a strained atmosphere. First meeting with Kotelianski. In Between Two Worlds Murry, describes his endless philosophical discussions with Lawrence and Gordon Campbell which make KM feel isolated and estranged.

February 3, 1915 Leslie arrives in England for military training.

February 15, 1915 Brief trip to France to join Carco. The episode provides inspiration for “An Indiscreet Journey”.

Feb 25, 1915 Returns to Murry at Rose Tree Cottage.

March –May 1915 Divides her time between Murry’s flat in London and Carco’s flat in Paris, near the Quai des Fleurs, while Carco is at the front. Begins writing “The Aloe,” reevoking her New Zealand childhood.

June 1915 Moves with Murry to 5 Acacia Road in St John’s Wood. Receives frequent visits from Leslie while he is stationed in England. In the garden of this house grows KM’s pear tree.

October 7, 1915 Leslie Beauchamp is killed in France while demonstrating how to use a hand grenade. KM plunges into depression.

November 1915 Moves with Murry to Bandol in the south of France.

December 7, 1915 Murry returns to London.

December 1915 Receives a moving letter of sympathy from Lawrence consoling her for Leslie’s death.

December 31, 1915 – February 1916 Murry joins KM in Bandol at the Villa Pauline. KM rewrites “The Aloe.”

April 1916 Returns to England with Murry and moves to Higher Tregerthen in Cornwall to be near the Lawrences, but finds their company overwhelming.

June 1916 Moves with Murry to Mylor in the south Cornish coast.

September 1916 Murry starts work as a translator in military intelligence. He and KM take up residence in Bloomsbury at 3 Gower Street. Painter Dorothy Brett lived on the second floor; Dora Carrington in the attic.

Autumn 1916 Frequents Lady Ottoline Morrell in Garsington The circle includes: Lytton-Strachey, T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley among others.

November 1916 Friendship and correspondence with Bertrand Russell begins. First meeting with Virginia Woolf.

February 1917 Moves to a studio at 141a Church street in Chelsea, later joined by Ida. Murry moves to 47 Redcliffe Road. Friendship develops with Virginia Woolf.

April 1917 Begins writing for the New Age again. Proposes “Prelude” to the Hogarth Press.

Winter 1917 Discovers spot on right lung.

January – February 1918 Returns alone to Bandol to the Hotel Beau Rivage. Begins writing “Je Ne Parle Pas Français”. Ida arrives in Bandol. Has first lung hemorrhage.

March 1918 Flees to Paris with Ida where they are trapped by the German bombardment

April 11,1918 Returns to London with Ida.

May 3, 1918 KM and Murry are married at the Kensington Registery Office. KM wears Frieda Lawrence’s wedding ring from her first marriage.

May-June 1918 Spends six weeks in Cornwall with Anne Estelle Rice.

August 8, 1918 Annie Beauchamp dies in Wellington.

August 1918 Moves with Murry too 2 Portland Villas, “the elephant” in Hampstead. Ida comes to live with them as housekeeper.

November 11, 1918 End of World War I

February 1919 Murry becomes editor of The Athenaeum.

April 1919 Begins reviewing for The Athenaeum. Begins translating Chekhov’s letters with Koteliansky.

September 1919 Travels to San Remo with Murry and Ida. After Murry’s departure, moves with Ida to the Casetta Deerholm in Ospedaletti.

November 1919 Receives visit from Harold Beauchamp and his cousin Connie.

Mid-December 1919 Murry joins KM in Ospedaletti.

January 1920 Travels with Ida to France and enters a L’Hermitage, a clinic in Menton Receives insulting letter from DH Lawrence.

February 1920 Goes to live at Villa Flora with Cousin Connie and companion, Jinnie Fullerton.

April, 1920 Returns with Ida to the Elephant in Hampstead.

September 1920 Travels with Ida to France, residing at Villa Isola Bella in Menton.

Autumn 1920 Sobieniowski blackmails KM over youthful love letters. Assisted by Ida, works intensely on reviews and short stories, including “Miss Brill” and “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” partially modeled on Ida. Learns of Murry’s liaison with Elizabeth Bibiesco.

December 2, 1920 Publication of Bliss and Other Stories.

December 1920 Murry joins her for Christmas in Menton.

May 1921-January 1922 Moves to Montreux, Switzerland with Ida. Moves to Chateau Belle Vue, Sierre where she is joined by Murry. Moves with Murry to Chalet des Sapins ( Montana-sur-Sierre), near her cousin Elizabeth. Writes “At the Bay”, “The Garden Party” and “The Doll’s House”. Obtains the address of Russian doctor Ivan Manoukhin from Koteliansky. Reads Cosmic Anatomy. Renews correspondence with A.R. Orage, already an enthusiast for Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

January 30, 1922 Leaves for Paris with Ida

February – May 1922 Decides to try Manoukhin’s X-ray treatment. Murry joins her in Paris; Ida returns to Switzerland. Publication of The Garden Party and Other Stories. Finds treatment debilitating. Writes “The Fly”.

June, 1922 Returns to Switzerland, near Randogne with Murry. Moves to Sierre with Ida.

August 1922 Returns to London with Murry and Ida. Stays with Dorothy Brett. Meets Orage.

September 1922 Attends Ouspensky’s lectures. Obtains the address of the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau from Ouspensky.

October 2, 1922 Travels with Ida to Paris

October 14, 1922 Examined by Dr. James C. Young, pupil of Gurdjieff.

October 16,1922 Enters the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, not as a pupil but as a guest, or special visitor. She will be befriended by Olgivanna, future wife of Frank Lloyd Wright, who will later publish a memoir of her friendship with KM in The Bookman, 1931 and by Alexandre de Salzmann and his wife, Jeanne. Ouspensky recounts a conversation at the institute with KM in In Search of the Miraculous. Orage will also publish his account of her life there in Talks with Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau in The Century, 1924.

January 9,1923 After Murry’s arrival at the institute for a visit, KM climbs a flight of stairs, haemorrhages and dies.

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‘She was on a par with Joyce, Lawrence and Woolf’: Katherine Mansfield’s new biographer on the writer’s legacy

Author claire harman talks to jessie thompson about the short story writer’s wild life and why she should be considered among the modernist greats, article bookmarked.

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K atherine Mansfield was the writer who didn’t sit still. In the century since her death, stories, memories and anecdotes have been passed down in which she seems akin to a human propeller. My favourite: her race to the finish line as she wrote her magnificent 1920 short story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, in which two spinsters collect themselves after the funeral of their controlling father. As she neared the end of the story, Mansfield, scared of dying – she had been diagnosed with TB in 1917 – wrote speedily, like a spinning top, at one point even stopping halfway up the stairs to write her next sentence. At 3am, the story was finally finished – but she didn’t go to bed; instead, she immediately wanted to read it to her friend, Ida Baker, who was living with and nursing her at the time.

“Once she got going on something, she was quite obsessive about it,” says Claire Harman, the author of All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything, a new biography that recounts this incident. And Mansfield needed to be – she was to die in 1923 at just 34, two years after “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” was published. Even her death, 100 years ago this week, seemed to have a unique vitality – Harman’s biography begins with Mansfield running up some stairs, which prompted “a great gush of blood” from her mouth that led to her dying minutes later.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, Mansfield lived a life that was packed with wild, and sometimes dark, incident. She was a voyager, moving to London for her education, and later hopping around Europe, making friends – and finding rivals – as she went. She had headlong love affairs with both men and women, and her first marriage was a sham; her second, with the writer John Middleton Murray, was immortalised in fiction as Gudrun and Gerald in DH Lawrence’s Women in Love . (She later told off a Romanian princess for consorting with her husband: “Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.”) Like Sylvia Plath, another born writer, she kept a journal in which her mind, unfiltered, came alive on the page. In an entry that bristles with energy, written on her 34th – and final – birthday, Mansfield outlines her hopes for her life: “I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing.”

Although she wrote more than 100 stories, as well as her journal, many reviews, and lots of entertaining letters, Mansfield’s literary reputation remains somewhat slight. “I think if she’d have written a couple of novels, as well as all of these short stories, she would have had more critical respect during those years where literature was being set up as a canon,” suggests Harman.

Last year’s celebrations of the birth of modernism in 1922 all but missed her out, even though, as Harman says, “she was completely on a par with, and working at the same time as, James Joyce, DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf” – all writers that she knew personally. But – long overdue – she is finally emerging as more of a forerunner than a footnote, with a legible influence on contemporaries such as Woolf, and writers that followed, from Evelyn Waugh to Alice Munro to Tessa Hadley. (Upon learning of Mansfield’s death, Woolf wrote in her diary that there was no point in writing – “Katherine won’t read it”.)

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If Woolf was your well-read friend who sipped cups of tea, Mansfield was your mate who made you drink a bottle of wine on a school night and told you things you couldn’t wait to repeat. Her stories are daring, unpredictable, threaded with the hum of life. Take the opening of her short story “Bliss”, in which 30-year-old Bertha Young seems to be almost bursting with joie de vivre. “What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss–absolute bliss!–as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?” It’s a description of rapt contentment that shimmers – only we are later to discover, in the kind of slow revelation characteristic of an Ishiguro novel, that Bertha’s existence is far from blissful.

There is a sense of quiet revelation to her stories that flits freely between horror and liberation. The half-finished sentence at the end of “The Garden Party”, in which a violent death ruins a genteel social affair. The mysterious sound of crying that closes “Miss Brill”, after its lonely protagonist returns her fur scarf to its box. The fleeting absentmindedness in the last glimpse of “The Fly”, where a father has distracted himself from his grief by playing God with a fly and an inkpot.

If Woolf was your well-read friend who sipped cups of tea, Mansfield was your mate who made you drink a bottle of wine on a school night

Importantly, notes Harman, Mansfield “never tries to write like a bloke”. Even in a world where women writers were rare, she unapologetically claimed the role of creative artist. “She’s so incredibly honest with herself. She was accused by other people of being a mask wearer and socially quite a slippery character. That’s completely intentional. She was playing the room every time,” Harman explains. She also had to deal with specifically female issues – the “gynaecological disasters”, in Harman’s words, that came from contracting gonorrhoea, and, later, becoming the subject of blackmail from a former lover possessing private letters. (She was to give Polish émigré Floryan Sobieniowski £40 to destroy them in 1920 – her entire advance for her next collection of stories.) It was an age in which she suffered, Harman says, for “just being a sexually active female”.

Claire Tomalin, the last to pen a major Mansfield biography before Harman (her book, A Secret Life came out in 1987), described Mansfield’s life as “painful, and it has been a painful task to write about it”. It is a vibrant life, and not an unfulfilled one – but it is tragically shorter than it should have been. There is, too, the challenge of lost material – what were in those letters Mansfield was blackmailed for? Having lived with TB for six years, Mansfield knew she was battling under the shadow of death, which makes her greatest lesson all the more powerful: she knew how to savour her days. “What she does is a kind of super mindfulness. She really wanted to just keep looking at things, keep enjoying things, just looking, looking, looking, writing things down,” says Harman. “That wonderful, incredible, life-affirming – and very useful to a reader – thing that Mansfield does, which is to show one how her imagination works, and how limitless and fecund and comforting the imagination is for anybody.”

Like many who are driven by an urge to write, Mansfield, with all her gifts, often felt she was coming up short, not quite getting there. “There’s no point where she ever becomes complacent. She’s very critical of herself all the time,” says Harman. “Something like ‘The Garden Party’, that people think of as a classic, she writes afterwards, ‘it’s not quite right. I could do better’.”

But there she was wrong. Writing on the stairs, conjuring up bliss, telling off princesses: we might wish for more Mansfield – but we could hardly wish for better.

‘All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything’, published by Chatto & Windus, is out now

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6 of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories You Need to Read

The only contemporary writer Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of, Katherine Mansfield is one of the greatest short story writers of all time. Here’s 6 you need to read.

Though she was born in New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield spent her adult life in Europe (principally in London), where she spent her time writing reviews, poems, and short stories. It is for her short fiction that she is best remembered now as one of the leading writers of the early twentieth century. Starting with a story from her very first collection and ending with one of her most famous, here we take a look at just six of Mansfield’s best short stories – and, at just a few pages in length each, they are all well worth a read.

1. “Germans at Meat,” 1910

Taken from her 1911 debut short story collection , In a German Pension , “Germans at Meat” was originally published in A.R. Orage’s The New Age magazine on March 3rd, 1910. As the title of the collection suggests, “Germans at Meat” is set in a pension in a German spa town, based on Mansfield’s own stay in Bad Wörishofen following her first marriage. (This disastrous marriage had been orchestrated by Mansfield after finding herself pregnant with another man’s child, and Mansfield incorporates a similarly broken-down marriage into the story.)

Like many of the other stories in In a German Pension , “Germans at Meat” depicts the national demeanors of the English and the Germans with a strongly satirical quality as the story’s narrator sits down to eat with her fellow guests. When called upon by her publisher for a reprint of the collection in 1920, however, Mansfield refused, stating that they were naïve apprentice pieces and also that she feared they may be aligned with anti-German sentiment following the First World War. Nonetheless, in 1926 (three years after her death), her second husband, John Middleton Murry, republished In a German Pension .

Perhaps as a result of her refusal to reprint and her own denigration of the collection, “Germans at Meat” (and in a German Pension in general) has not received as much attention as some of her later works. While Mansfield may have claimed to feel somewhat ashamed of these juvenile short stories, “Germans at Meat” showcases Mansfield’s flair for investing seemingly inconsequential moments with real significance and thereby investing the reader in her characters’ stories.

2. “The Woman at the Store,” 1912

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Whereas “Germans at Meat” was written in the aftermath of Mansfield’s disastrous first marriage, “The Woman at the Store” played a pivotal role in bringing Mansfield and her second husband together. John Middleton Murry was co-founder and editor at Rhythm , an artistic and literary periodical dedicated to showcasing contemporary avant-garde work.

Poet and novelist Walter “Willy” George – a mutual friend of Murry and Mansfield – sent Murry a short story of Mansfield’s, though it was turned down. Though impressed by the quality of her writing, Murry felt that the satirical fairy-tale-like story was not the right fit for Rhythm and instead asked for something darker. Mansfield duly obliged, sending him “The Woman at the Store,” a tale of murder in the New Zealand wilderness. Upon reading the story, Murry was determined to meet its author, and, as Claire Harman notes, Rhythm “soon became Murry and Mansfield’s joint venture” (see Further Reading, Harman).

It is no wonder that “The Woman at the Store” so impressed Murry. It is a remarkably mature story for such a young writer to produce: a vivid, striking, and deeply unsettling piece of writing in which judgment is suspended so that the facts of a woman’s life – ruined by poverty and her husband’s cruelty – might be told. Though Mansfield had somewhat equivocal views on the suffrage movement, throughout her stories, she displays an interest in the lives of other women and an empathic awareness of their suffering under systemic gender inequalities and the oppressive, predatory, and abusive behavior of men.

3. “The Garden Party,” 1922

“The Garden Party” was first published in three parts in the Saturday Westminster Gazette and the Weekly Westminster Gazette in 1922 – that famous year in literary modernism when T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses were published and the world, according to Willa Cather, broke in two.

In the same year, it was published as the title story of her collection The Garden Party and Other Stories. Set in New Zealand, the Sheridan family lives a life of luxury that is modeled after Mansfield’s own privileged upbringing as the daughter of an extremely wealthy businessman. They are to host a garden party, and the entire family is busy with preparations. While supervising the food preparations, sisters Laura and Jose are informed of the death of a working-class neighborhood, Mr. Scott, who died in front of the gates to their house. Instinctively, Laura feels that the party should be called off and is horrified that no one else in her family shares this opinion. Nonetheless, she is convinced to forget the matter for now and go ahead with the party after seeing herself reflected in a mirror, wearing a hat given to her by her mother for the occasion.

After the party, her mother instructs her to take a basket filled with leftover food from the party to the Scott family home. Here, Laura is confronted not only with Mr. Scott’s grieving widow and family but also with his dead body. His corpse exerts a strange fascination over Laura: she is struck by his peaceful expression in death, yet she flees the house and runs into her brother, Laurie, on her way home. The ending, however, evades resolution. Laura finds herself unable to articulate her feelings to her brother – and the reader is left with no guarantee that her brother has understood her.

With echoes of the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone , “The Garden Party” is a masterful meditation on mortality, morality, and class consciousness. It is one of Mansfield’s best-known – and best-loved – short stories, and deservedly so.

4. “Bliss,” 1918

Woolf felt such a violent distaste for “Bliss” that, upon first reading the story in the prestigious English Review in August 1918, she threw her copy of the magazine across the room. Writing in her diary, Woolf criticized the quality of Mansfield’s writing – but it seems likely that her dislike for “Bliss” was far more personal.

In many ways, “Bliss” seems to bear some Woolfian hallmarks. The story is set immediately before and during a dinner party held by Bertha and Harry Young, just as Woolf would go on to place parties at the center of Mrs Dalloway and the first section of To the Lighthouse . Bertha anticipates the arrival of Pearl Fulton, a friend of hers, with such excitement that she experiences a strange sensation of bliss that verges on the homoerotic . While she experiences this sensation, she looks into her garden at a pear tree, which she then invests with symbolic resonance. During the party, she and Pearl gaze at the tree together in what Bertha believes to be an intimate moment of mutual understanding. When Pearl betrays her before the evening is over, however, it seems that Bertha has misread their relationship and perhaps the symbolism of the pear tree, too.

Why did Woolf (who later claimed that Mansfield was the only contemporary writer of whom she had felt jealous) take such a vehement dislike to this short story? The story’s irony may well have seemed especially barbed to Woolf, as Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney have argued, “since the character of Pearl Fulton shared some of her own most prominent qualities,” including her “icy aloofness” and her tendency to hold her head slightly to one side (see Further Reading, Midorikawa and Sweeney, p. 229).

5. “Psychology,” 1920

“Psychology” centers around a platonic relationship between a man and a woman. They take tea and cake together and discuss, among other things, “whether the novel of the future will be a psychological novel or not.” This leads the man to pose the question: “How sure are you that psychology qua psychology has got anything to do with literature at all?” When their friendly discussion and moments of comfortable silence threaten to tilt into something more poignant, however, neither knows how to articulate themselves so that their old friend will understand them.

Perhaps pointing to the unknowability of other people, “Psychology” points to the early twentieth century’s fascination with the emerging science of psychology. Such was the fascination that the twentieth century is sometimes referred to as the Freudian century – and it is no coincidence, therefore, that dreams feature heavily in “Prelude.”

While “Psychology” gives us insight into the importance of Freudian theorizing in the twentieth century and contemporary thoughts surrounding psychology’s place within literature, it also provides insight into Mansfield’s writing technique. In one of his remarks that threatens to disturb the equilibrium of their friendship, the man states: “If I shut my eyes I can see this place down to every detail – every detail … […] Often when I am away from here I revisit it in spirit – wander about among your red chairs, stare at the bowl of fruit on the black table […].” In describing her writing process, Mansfield also stated that she could imaginatively inhabit spaces she wished to write about and render them more vividly real in her fiction.

6. “Prelude,” 1918

First published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1918, “Prelude” is one of Mansfield’s best-known short stories. Originally, “Prelude” started out as a longer piece called “The Aloe,” which Mansfield began in 1915 and then refined over the following years. The story fictionalizes Mansfield’s own family’s move to Karori, a Wellington suburb, in 1893. Mansfield had been inspired to return to her New Zealand childhood through her writing following the death of her beloved brother Leslie in 1915, and “Prelude” proves that Mansfield is often at her best when writing of her native country.

“Prelude” is split into twelve short, somewhat impressionistic sections, perhaps pointing to Mansfield’s admiration of the impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh , whose Sunflowers “taught me something about writing, which was queer—a kind of freedom—or rather, a shaking free” (see Further Reading, O’Sullivan and Scott, p. 333). It also has strong symbolic qualities, as the aloe (after which the earlier version of the story was named) exerts a fascination on Mansfield’s characters. And, by way of literary influences, the title of the story point to T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes.”

The story begins in media res, as many of Mansfield’s stories do, which has the effect of immediately situating the reader in the narrative. Here and across the next eleven sections, the reader is introduced to the various family members and invited into their consciousnesses through Mansfield’s masterful use of free indirect discourse (sometimes referred to as the intimate third person). There are moments of shocking violence, family arguments, and domestic strife, through which Mansfield explores feelings of isolation and (female) oppression within the family.

“Prelude” is one of Mansfield’s most accomplished short stories. She brilliantly captures a child’s view of an adult world through the character of Kezia – who, needless to say, is widely believed to be modeled on her own childhood self. As Virginia Woolf herself said of “Prelude,” “it has the living power, the detached existence of a work of art” (see Further Reading, Tomalin, p. 177).

While some critics have attempted to dismiss her as a minor writer lacking the stamina necessary to write a novel (and thereby positing the short story as a lesser literary form compared with the novel), Mansfield pioneered a new vision for English short fiction that was influenced by French and Russian writers, and, in doing so, she brought the English short story up to par with its twentieth-century continental counterparts. Her writing is vivid, immersive, and innovative – as the short stories listed above, and many others, attest.

Further Reading:

Harman, Claire, All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (London: Vintage, 2023).

Midorikawa, Emily, and Emma Claire Sweeney, A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (London: Arum Press, 2017).

O’Sullivan, Vincent, and Margaret Scott (eds.), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 4: 1920-1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).

Tomalin, Claire, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Penguin, 2012).

What is Avant-Garde Art?

By Catherine Dent MA 20th and 21st Century Literary Studies, BA English Literature Catherine holds a first-class BA from Durham University and an MA with distinction, also from Durham, where she specialized in the representation of glass objects in the work of Virginia Woolf. In her spare time, she enjoys writing fiction, reading, and spending time with her rescue dog, Finn.

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Katherine Mansfield

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Katherine Mansfield’s experiences growing up in colonial New Zealand heightened her awareness of the discontinuities, lacunae, and tensions of modern life. She was born in 1888 in Wellington, a town labeled “the empire city” by its white inhabitants, who modeled themselves on British life and relished their city’s bourgeois respectability. [1]   At an early age, Mansfield witnessed the disjuncture between the colonial and the native, or Maori, ways of life, prompting her to criticize the treatment of the Maoris in several diary entries and short stories. [2]  Mansfield’s biographer, Angela Smith, writes: “It was her childhood experience of living in a society where one way of life was imposed on another, and did not quite fit in” that sharpened her modernist impulse to focus on moments of “disruption” or encounters with “strange or disturbing” aspects of life. [3]

Her feelings of disjuncture were accentuated when she arrived in Britain in 1903 to attend Queen’s College. In many respects, Mansfield remained a lifelong outsider, a traveler between two seemingly similar yet profoundly different worlds. After briefly returning to New Zealand in 1906, she moved back to Europe in 1908, living and writing in England and parts of continental Europe. Until her premature death from tuberculosis at the age of 34, Mansfield remained in Europe, leading a Bohemian, unconventional way of life.

The Domestic Picturesque

Mansfield’s short story “Prelude” is set in New Zealand and dramatizes the disjunctures of colonial life through an account of the Burnell family’s move from Wellington to a country village. The story takes its title from Wordsworth’s seminal poem, “The Prelude,” the first version of which was completed in 1805, which casts the poet as a traveler and chronicles the “growth of a poet’s mind.” [4] Although the Burnell family moves a mere “six miles” from town, the move is not inconsequential; it enacts a break with their previous way of life and alerts the family members to the various discontinuities in their lives. Beneath the veneer of the Burnells’ harmonious domestic life are faint undercurrents of aggression and unhappiness. The haunting specter of a mysterious aloe plant and a slaughtered duck in their well-manicured yard suggests that the family’s “awfully nice” new home conceals moments of brutality and ignorance toward another way of life that was suppressed and denied. [5] As I will propose, these two incidents echo the aesthetic concept of the sublime, as they encapsulate a mysterious power that awes its beholders and cannot be fully contained within their picturesque home.

Through her subtle, dream-like prose, Mansfield deploys traditional aesthetic conventions like the picturesque while simultaneously transfiguring, subverting, and reinventing them in a modernist context. The concept of the picturesque was first defined by its originator, William Gilpin, an 18th century artist and clergyman, as “that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.” [6] Thus, a scene or representation is beautiful when it echoes an already-established, artistic conception of beauty, revealing the self-reinforcing way in which art creates the standard of beauty for both art and life. Mansfield presents these picturesque moments in order to demystify them and reveal the suppression and violence they contain. In addition to “Prelude,” her stories “Garden Party” and “Bliss” dramatize the transformation and inversion of picturesque moments of bourgeois life and domestic harmony. While she seems to exhibit a certain attachment to these standard aesthetic forms, Mansfield subtly interrogates many of these conventions in a strikingly modernist way.

Through her childhood in a colony, Mansfield also became attuned to the violence and inequalities of colonialism. As Angela Smith suggests, her early writings demonstrate a keen sensitivity towards a repressed history of brutality and duplicity. [7] In her 1912 short story “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,” she questions and overturns the perspective of the colonialist, whose vantage point historically trumps that of the native. The deliberate ambivalence of the word “kidnapping” dramatizes the conflict between the colonist’s perspective and Pearl’s joyful, eye-opening experiences during her abduction. In a similar way, empire dramatized for Mansfield the way that a picturesque, bourgeois household could suppress alternative perspectives.

The Sublime

In “Prelude,” the mysterious, sublime aloe plant disrupts the pleasant domesticity of the Burnell household. Their well-manicured yard with its tennis lawn, garden, and orchard also contains a wild, unseemly side—“this was the frightening side, and no garden at all.” [8]  This “side” contains the aloe plant, which exerts a mysterious, enthralling power over its awed beholders. In its resemblance to the ocean, the aloe assumes the characteristics of the sublime: “the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a shop with the oars lifted. Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew.” [9] For many writers and poets, the ocean was a manifestation of the sublime because of its unfathomable power and scale that awed and humbled its observers.

The aloe’s strikingly physiological effect on its viewers recalls Edmund Burke’s sublime, which overpowers its observer and reinforces the limitations of human reason and control. In his famous treatise on the sublime, Burke writes: “greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or quantity” is a powerful cause of the sublime, as it embodies the violent and overpowering forces of nature. [10] In a similar vein, the child, Kezia Burnell’s first impression upon seeing the “fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem” is one of awe and wonder. [11] In this case, the sublimity of the aloe plant disrupts and challenges the domestic picturesque as it defies mastery, categorization, and traditional notions of beauty. In its resistance to categorization and control, the sublime embodies the part of the ungovernable landscape that the Burnell family cannot domesticate and the picturesque cannot frame. As a result, in “Prelude,” the magnitude of the sublime interrupts and fractures the tranquil surface of the picturesque by exposing the unfathomable depths beneath it.

The colonial backdrop of the Burnells’ yard also contributes to the mysterious, occult power of the aloe. This unruly part of their property hints toward a landscape that eludes domestication and serves as a constant reminder that the Burnell family is living in a land that is not quite theirs and cannot be fully tamed. [12] At the age of 19, Mansfield wrote that the New Zealand bush outside of the cities is “all so gigantic and tragic—and even in the bright sunlight it is so passionately secret.” [13] For Mansfield, the bush embodies the history of a people whose lives have been interrupted and displaced by European settlers. [14] After wars, brutal colonial practices, and European diseases had devastated the local Maori population, the bush became a haunting monument to their presence. As the Burnell family settles down to sleep on the first night in their new home, “far away in the bush there sounded a harsh rapid chatter: “Ha-ha-ha… Ha-ha-ha.” [15] In her subtle way, Mansfield unveils the voices of those whose perspectives are excluded from this portrait of nocturnal domestic harmony.

In a similar way, the aloe plant exudes an unfathomable history that is beyond the time and place of the Burnells. Even its age—implied by the fact that it flowers “once every hundred years”—suggests that the aloe exists on a different scale than its human beholders. [16] In its ancient, superhuman scale, the aloe gestures towards the “gigantic,” indicating a subtle, but implicitly threatening power within, or in proximity of the home. The aloe is a kind of lacuna in the imperial landscape of New Zealand, whose power threatens the colonial household and its control over the landscape. [17]

By disrupting and encroaching upon the ostensibly safe domestic sphere, the aloe also echoes the “unheimlich,” or uncanny, an aesthetic concept explored by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, “The Uncanny.” The uncanny becomes, in part, an invasive force violating the sacred, domestic sphere and hearkens back to a previously repressed or hidden impulse: “The uncanny is something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.” [18] In “Prelude,” the aloe is initially depicted as a threatening force that “might have had claws instead of roots. The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something.” [19] Positioned within the safe space of their property, the aloe is a menacing, ungovernable force that seems to encroach upon it. The plant becomes part of the repressed history of the landscape—a history that is only apparent to Kezia, her mother Linda Burnell, and her grandmother Mrs. Fairfield, who are attuned to the forces below the surface of the picturesque exterior.

Violent Underpinnings

Beneath many of Mansfield’s picturesque domestic scenes are moments of violence and rupture. In “Garden Party,” for instance, a poor man falls to his death during the preparations for a much-anticipated social gathering of the wealthy Sheridan family, undermining the convivial spirit of the occasion. In “Prelude,” Pat, the handyman, slaughters a duck while the children watch with grotesque enthrallment as it waddles for a few steps after being decapitated. “The crowning wonder” of the dead duck walking hearkens back to Burke’s sublime, which is experienced in “Prelude” within the confines of the private residence. [20] The sublimity of this apparent defiance of the properties of death acts as a dramatic external force imposing on the observers’ intellect and reason in a profoundly Burkian way.

But later that night, when the duck is placed in front of the patriarch, Stanley Burnell, “it did not look as if it had ever had a head.” [21] The duck’s picturesque dressing—“its legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round it”—conceals its violent death. [22] In a similar way, the “awfully nice” picturesque house is imposed upon the landscape, as if it had never been any other way. [23] Through reconfiguration and transformation, a new imperial order conceals the fact that an older order once lay beneath it. In both cases, the picturesque functions as a way of naturalizing the violent order of domination. As Pat’s golden earrings distract Kezia from her grief over the duck’s death, the duck’s pretty garnish conceals its “basted resignation.” [24] There is no such thing as a pure aesthetics, Mansfield seems to suggest, as each serene moment is implicated in some act of violence, brutality, or suppression.

In “Prelude,” the good-natured Pat disrupts a pre-existing picturesque scene in which ducks “preen their dazzling breasts” amidst the pools and “bushes of yellow flowers and blackberries.” [25] Tellingly, the duck pond contains a bridge, a typical feature of the picturesque that reconciles or bridges the gap between different aspects of the scenery. In this way, the Burnell family’s cultivation of the land by planting and slaughtering ducks disrupts another underlying order. Their unquestioning appropriation of this pre-existing order mirrors the way colonial life disrupted and undermined the indigenous Maori life. Juxtaposing two picturesque scenes that interrupt and conflict with one another, Mansfield questions and unravels the conventional image of the picturesque. This interplay of various conflicting aesthetic orders constitutes part of Mansfield’s modernist style, in which aesthetic forms are ruptured, fragmented, and overturned.

As the yard’s landscape bears traces of the Maori past, so the quiet harmony of the Burnells’ domesticity is underscored by deep, unspoken tensions and an animosity that hints at the uncanny. In fact, the only character who expresses any contentment is Stanley, who reflects, “By God, he was a perfect fool to feel as happy as this!” [26] Yet even he shudders upon entering his new driveway, as “a sort of panic overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home.” [27] Beneath this veneer of marital bliss and familial harmony, his wife Linda occasionally ignores her children and expresses hatred towards her husband and his aggressive sexuality: “there were times when he was frightening—really frightening. When she screamed at the top of her voice, ‘You are killing me.’” [28] Meanwhile Stanley and Beryl, Linda’s sister, seem to have a flirtatious, indecent relationship: “Only last night when he was reading the paper her false self had stood beside him and leaned against his shoulder on purpose. Hadn’t she put her hand over his… so that he should see how white her hand was beside his brown one.” [29] Dramatizing these dynamics, Mansfield suggests that a “happy” household outside of town is not as “dirt cheap” as Stanley boasts; it comes at the cost of servitude, sexual aggression, and a ravaged Maori landscape. [30]

Through these layers, which Mansfield subtly strips off one at a time, she artfully exposes the way that an existing political and aesthetic order is not what it seems to be or how it has always been. Her short stories are fraught with their own tensions; while exposing the picturesque as false and absurd, she nevertheless draws on its conventional associations. Similarly, her subtle attempts to question colonial power are embedded in a seemingly idealized portrait of colonial life. Mansfield creates a seemingly beautiful or normal image, such as the happy family in “Prelude,” “Bliss,” or “Garden Party,” and then slowly challenges it through a subtle counter-narrative. In this way, her deployment of modernist techniques is less pronounced than that of James Joyce and her other modernist contemporaries. Just as she challenges aesthetic conventions, Mansfield unravels the reader’s ideas about her own stories by presenting a seemingly beautiful, transparent narrative that is haunted by tensions, lacunae, and opacity. Like the headless walking duck, these fictions of transparency and harmony quickly collapse upon closer inspection.

• ↑ Angela Smith, Introduction to Katherine Mansfield’s “Selected Stories,” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. x.
• ↑ Smith, p. xi.
• ↑ William Wordsworth, The Complete Poetical Works, introduction by John Morley, London: Macmillan and Co., 1888, p. 234.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 92.
• ↑ William Gilpin, “An essay on prints,” London, 1792, p. 5.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 71.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 90.
• ↑ Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” New York: Garland Publishing, 1971, p. 127.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 73.
• ↑ First mapped by James Cook in the late 18th century, New Zealand was settled by large numbers of European settlers in the 1840’s. Writing only forty years after the establishment of a large, permanent base of European settlers, Mansfield and many of her compatriots were made aware of their impact on the local Maori population.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 63.
• ↑ J. Lawrence Mitchell, “Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object,” Journal of New Zealand Literature: No. 22 (2004), p. 34.
• ↑ Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 64.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 84.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 87.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 82.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 76.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 75.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 95.
• ↑ Mansfield, p. 62.

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Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)

Biography: katherine mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a middle-class colonial family. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a banker, and her mother, Annie Burnell Dyer, was of genteel origins. She lived for six years in the rural village of Karori. Later in life Mansfield said, “I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” At the age of nine, she had her first story published. Entitled “Enna Blake,” it appeared in The High School Reporter in Wellington, with the editor’s comment that it “shows promise of great merit.”

As a first step to her rebellion against her background, she moved to London in 1903 and studied at Queen’s College, where she joined the staff of the College Magazine . Returning to New Zealand in 1906, she took up music and became an accomplished cellist, but her father denied her the opportunity to become a professional musician. During this time, she had romantic affairs with both men and women.

In 1908, she studied typing and bookkeeping at Wellington Technical College. Her lifelong friend Ida Baker (known as “L.M.” or “Leslie Moore” in her diary and correspondence) persuaded Mansfield’s father to allow Katherine to move back to England with an allowance of £100 a year. There she devoted herself to writing. Mansfield never visited New Zealand again.

After an unhappy marriage in 1909 to George Brown, whom she left a few days after the wedding, Mansfield toured for a while as an extra in opera. Before the marriage she had had an affair with Garnett Trowell, a musician, and became pregnant. In Bavaria, where Mansfield spent some time, she suffered a miscarriage. During her stay in Germany, she wrote satirical sketches of German characters, which were published in 1911 under the title In a German Pension . Earlier her stories had appeared in The New Age . On her return to London, Mansfield became ill with an untreated sexually transmitted disease she contracted from Floryan Sobieniowski, a condition which contributed to her weak health for the rest of her life. Sobieniowski was a Polish émigré translator whom she met in Germany. Her first story published in England was “The Child-Who-Was-Tired,” which was about an overworked nursemaid who kills a baby.

Mansfield attended literary parties without much enthusiasm: “Pretty rooms and pretty people, pretty coffee, and cigarettes out of a silver tankard… I was wretched.” Always outspoken, she was once turned out of an omnibus (a horse-drawn bus) after calling another woman a whore; the woman had declared that all suffragettes ought to be trampled to death by horses. In 1911, she met John Middleton Murry, a socialist and former literary critic, who was first a tenant in her flat, then her lover. Until 1914 she published stories in Rhythm and The Blue Review . During the war, she travelled restlessly between England and France. After her brother “Chummie”died in World War I, Mansfield focused her writing on New Zealand and her family, and “Prelude” (1916), one of her most famous stories, comes from this period. After divorcing her first husband in 1918, Mansfield married Murry. In the same year, she was found to have tuberculosis.

Mansfield and Murry were closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Upon learning that Murry had an affair with the Princess Bibesco (née Asquith), Mansfield objected not to the affair but to her letters to Murry. In a letter to the princess, she wrote: “I am afraid you must stop writing these love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world.”

Her last years Mansfield spent in southern France and in Switzerland, seeking relief from tuberculosis. As a part of her treatment in 1922 at an institute, Mansfield had to lie a few hours every day on a platform suspended over a cow manger. She breathed odours emanating from below, but the treatment did no good. Without the company of her literary friends, family, or her husband, she wrote much about her own roots and her childhood. Mansfield died of a pulmonary hemorrhage on January 9, 1923, in Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau, France. Her last words were: “I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face.”

Mansfield’s family memoirs were collected in Bliss (1920). Only three volumes of Mansfield’s stories were published during her lifetime. “Miss Brill” is about a woman who enjoys the beginning of the “season.” She goes to her “special” seat with her fur. She had taken it out of its box in the afternoon, shaken off the moth-powder, and given it a brush. She feels that she has a part in the play in the park, and somebody will notice if she isn’t there. A couple sits near her. The girl laughs at her fur and the man says: “Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?” Miss Brill hurries back home, unclasps the neckpiece quickly, and puts it in the box. “But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.”

In “The Garden Party” (1921), an extravagant garden party is arranged on a beautiful day. Laura, the daughter of the party’s hostess, hears of the accidental death of a young local working-class man, Mr. Scott, who lived in the neighbourhood. Laura wants to cancel the party, but her mother refuses to understand. She fills a basket with sandwiches, cakes, pastries, and other food, goes to the widow’s house, and sees the dead man in the bedroom where he is lying. “He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane.” Crying she tells her brother, who is looking for her: “‘It was simply marvellous. But, Laurie –’ She stopped, she looked at her brother. ‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life –’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.”

Mansfield was greatly influenced by Anton Chekov, sharing his warm humanity and attention to small details of human behaviour. Her influence on the development of the modern short story was also notable. Among her literary friends were Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, who considered her overpraised, and D.H. Lawrence, who later turned against Murry and her. Mansfield’s journal, letters, and scrapbook were edited by her husband, who ignored her wish that he should “tear up and burn as much as possible” of the papers she left behind her.

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Authors’ Calendar jonka tekijä on Petri Liukkonen on lisensoitu Creative Commons Nimeä-Epäkaupallinen-Ei muutettuja teoksia 1.0 Suomi (Finland) lisenssillä .

• British Literature: Victorians and Moderns. Authored by : James Sexton. Located at : https://opentextbc.ca/englishliterature . Project : BCcampus Open Textbook Project. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Image of Katherine Mansfield. Located at : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Katherinemansfield.jpg . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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A Modernist’s Modernist: On the Brilliance—and Influence—of Katherine Mansfield

“thinking about mansfield’s work makes me understand again how literature is never just a story.”.

The Katherine Mansfield Memorial Garden is a peaceful, oblong-shaped park set in the midst of Thorndon, in Wellington, New Zealand. It is named after the city’s most famous daughter, the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, whose work is widely read in France and Europe but has been slow to capture the attention of British and American readers and critics.

That is set to change this year, as the centenary of Mansfield’s death this month marks the beginning of a flurry of publications and reviews honoring the author of a prose style that Virginia Woolf envied (“I was jealous of her writing,” she wrote after Mansfield’s death, “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”) and whose stories established a prototype for the kind of short fiction in English we now take for granted.

Terms such as “slice-of-life” and in medias res may well be said to have been applied by Mansfield first: “Her work will always move closely against the grain of her own experience, but she will shake it free from the conventional plot, from the usual expectations.” writes Vincent O’Sullivan, editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield .

Her stories plunge the reader into their midst and off we go: “And after all the weather was ideal.” “The week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives.” “In the afternoon the chairs came.” From their first lines, the reader is brought right inside the fictional worlds which simply seem to open up and change as time passes—a method that Mansfield herself described as “unfolding,” introducing to literature a kind of free indirect narrative that traces the actions and minds of characters with such detail and nuance and sensitivity that she may as well be writing in invisible ink. “What form is it? you ask,” she wrote in a letter to the painter Dorothy Brett about her long short story “Prelude,” first published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. “As far as I know it’s more or less my own invention.”

Scholars and critics are in general agreement that Mansfield’s best work—“comparable with Proust’s breakthrough into the subconscious world,” said Frank O’Connor—are the so-called New Zealand stories: “so-called” for while they are set in places not actually named as Wellington or Days Bay, the small summer town across the harbor from that city, or Karori, a northern suburb that is the setting for “Prelude” and “The Dolls House,” they are nevertheless clearly drawing upon these places and others, a lansdcape and world Mansfield had been born into and grew up amongst.

She left New Zealand to pursue a life of writing alongside the Bloomsbury set—Lawrence and Joyce, the Woolfs and EM Forster and Bertrand Russell were her friends and readers—and never returned, though the country continued to work upon her imagination right up until the end of her short life. “I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World,” she wrote in her journal, returning over and over to her theme. “It must be mysterious, as though floating. It must take the breath.” She died from tuberculosis at the age of 34 in Fontainebleau, even in her last days writing to her father about “a turn towards home.” “If I began asking you questions about Wellington ways there would be no end to it,” she concludes.

Thorndon is the right place for the Memorial Garden, which is a stone’s throw from the house where Katherine Mansfield was born and grew up. Thorndon is where she went to school, took cello lessons, saw friends, and went to parties that were celebrated in stories such as “The Garden Party,” “The Singing Lesson,” and “A Birthday.” Thorndon was where she returned as a girl, after her first trip to London where her education was “finished” at Queen’s College in Harley Street, and from where she left again “for ever” as she said, just before she turned 20. “I am ashamed of young New Zealand,” she wrote in letters to London, “—oh the tedium vitae of 19 years!”

The Gardens are laid to grass, mostly, crisscrossed by small paths and with an enclosed area set to one side which has been planted with scented herbs and flowers for the blind; the names of which, marjoram and camomile and verbena, are formed in Braille along the stone wall and planters that shelter them. The fragrance these give off on a high summer’s day in Wellington would have been familiar to the writer who spent months of her adult life in the South of France, as well as in Italy and Switzerland, seeking a cure for the disease that had hounded her for most of her adult life.

At the other end of the Gardens is an avenue of cherry trees, giving the whole place a sense of scale beyond its actual dimensions, which comprise an area no longer or wider than a small city street. My parents were photographed on their wedding day standing under those trees; I have a black and white print of them together, my mother looking as though she is a figure on top of a marzipan iced wedding cake—her arms held out on either side of her bell-shaped skirt, her face tilted to the camera, and her little tiara with its veil set in place on her short helmet of shiny hair. My father beside her is tall and tentative in his dark suit, which seems to be the same shade of black as the trunks of the trees that fall in ranks behind him; he holds his new wife at her tiny waist as though he might protect her.

My mother loved the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, and she loved Thorndon. It is one of the oldest urban areas in New Zealand and full of (as Mansfield and my mother might have said) “charm.” The houses and buildings reflect their colonial past: planned and designed to follow the layout and architecture of streets and terraces “back home,” as people in New Zealand used to refer to Britain as late as the 70s, when I was growing up there. There are rows of workers cottages as well as the kind of detached two- and three-story mansions set in large gardens that you might see in London or Edinburgh, as well as family homes and shops and businesses with stained glass windows and heavy front doors.

My mother knew a great deal about colonial style, the lacy delicate trelliswork that decorated verandas and porches, the wide front steps and railings leading to hallways laid with kauri, a New Zealand redwood, and about the furniture, domestic wares, and paintings these houses had once contained. She collected “antiques,” as items no more than 100 years old were called in New Zealand then, and went to restoration and upholstery classes so that she could learn to restore the chairs and tables she collected, fit them out in the fabrics and finishes of their age.

Like Mansfield, whose stories contain the scenes and drawing room chatter of an Edwardian London even when located elsewhere, or who ascribes to her European settings a new-world sensibility that cuts through old-world class registers and niceties, my mother spent a great deal of her time thinking about what it was to imagine a somewhere else while being caught up in the reality of the present. Both liked to hold together the idea that one might simultaneously be here, and also, in some way, there.

So it was that Wellington, the capital city of a colonial outpost located in the Pacific Ocean, was imagined as part and parcel of an older place, of a Scotland or England; the country somehow part of Europe too. For Mansfield, the South of France would always remind her of Days Bay; for my mother, Days Bay was the South of France. They weren’t the only people to do this when I was growing up there.

A lot of us thought that way—going to schools with houses named after Scottish castles, dancing to the pipes at ceilidhs and Caledonian balls, singing “God Save the Queen” at sports days and in the cinema. It was no wonder that the here and the there might become merged in our minds. My sister and I used to imagine that over the bush-covered hills in the distance from our house were the avenues and streets of New York. It was just a case of making the journey over the Orongorongo ranges.

For my mother, Thorndon represented that “here and there” world completely. She was married in St Paul’s, where Mansfield went to church as a child, a white-painted wooden cathedral a five-minute walk from the Gardens where she was photographed. She sent my sister and me to a girls’ school that was around the corner from Mansfield’s birthplace and backed onto another street where her family had moved, just a block away from where Mansfield herself had been educated.

The Gardens were across the road from my sixth-form building, and as senior girls we were allowed to have periods off to go study and read there in the summer term. I remember precisely the feeling of hitching up our blue linen summer uniform dresses, socks rolled down and bare legs stretched out in the sun; tubes of Coppertone and baby oil being fished out of PE satchels while preparing for exams in Advanced Level English Lit; going through stories by Katherine Mansfield that were set just down the road and yet also seemed to be full of London and France. Art and life, life and art. The here and the there.

My mother would have loved the way both realities conjoined, the story and the experience, the fictions and the facts; how both seemed to be versions of each other in the Memorial Gardens that year. By the time exams came round and I was writing essays on “Bliss” and “Sun and Moon” and “The Voyage” that she’d read to me as a child, she’d been dead for nearly a year and I thought I was used to her absence. Her way of interpreting the world, though—that had stayed with me. The stories, after all, were still there.

Does death fasten an imaginative idea more firmly to the mind, I wonder? I think in my case it might. For try as I have over the years, I can’t help shift this notion of here and there thinking. It’s part of how I see a place, experience it, remember it, even. When my mother used to read aloud to me a Mansfield story set in a French Jardins Publiques, which seems to draw upon the Wellington Botanical Gardens, also in Thorndon, about a quarter mile from the much smaller Memorial Gardens, I can’t help but retain the impression that both real and invented parks are indeed one and the same. To arrive, as a child, at the big iron gates at the entrance of these and to make my way down the wide path with flowerbeds on either side to the rotunda was to follow Miss Brill to her seat to listen to the band play in the story named after her and to go where Mansfield herself had walked before her.

Reading about a place can be to feel as though one knows it, in the same way that to be in the place can remind us of its fictional counterparts. I remember my first time in New York, going through Central Park at dusk while the buildings lit up behind the winter trees: the exact color of that twilight; the lights coming on in apartments and offices; the view through the taxi window. How I seemed to be as much in a novel set in New York as I was in the backseat of a yellow cab. There are lots of places in the world that bring this sort of two-way vision.

Mansfield’s Thorndon is as real in her stories as it is also a part of the world I know so well. I walk down Tinakori Road, Thorndon’s main shopping street that still retains its 19th-century outlines despite the motorway that rushes alongside, and I might be a character in a section of “Juliet,” a very early draft of a story that might have become a novel. I might be in step with Mansfield herself as she and her brother in “The Wind Blows” “zigzag” down the path to the Pohutukawa tree that once stood at the water’s edge but is now on the reclaimed land where the bus stopped to take me home sometimes after school. In the photo of my parents on their wedding day, my mother’s hand rests on my father’s dark sleeve just as Leila imagines “the bolster on which her hand rested felt like the sleeve of an unknown young man’s dress suit” in “Her First Ball.” I wonder if my mother thought the same as she laid her hand there, all those years ago. I wonder who she was, that bride, that woman—and will never really know.

Yet reading about Katherine Mansfield helps me get just a little closer to my mother, her mind and imagination. Thinking about Mansfield’s work makes me understand again how literature is never just a story, a narrative, an event on the page to be read aloud to a child or silently to oneself alone. It is also an experience, caught up with the here and now along with memory and the past. For where were we when we read this novel or that one? Who were we talking with when we discovered this poet’s work or another’s set of short stories? Details of personal history are caught up and captured in the texts and pages and screens before us, and they become part of the story, part of who we are. Like the shadows cast upon the lawns and gardens of Mansfield’s stories, reminding us, as her stories always do, that presence and absence go together.

This January, the month of Mansfield’s death, is the August of Paris and New York in the southern hemisphere. Businesses close, schools are off, city streets are deserted, everyone is at the beach or away. Katherine Mansfield wrote her story “At the Bay” to capture exactly that feeling of time off—a family’s escape to its summer cottage, or “bach” as it is called in New Zealand—a story “full of sand and seaweed and dresses hanging over verandahs and sandshoes on windowsills,” a fiction based on family holidays that went on to influence Woolf’s famous novel To the Lighthouse .

When Mansfield died Woolf wrote in her diary, “At that one feels—what? A shock of relief? —a rival the less! Then confusion at feeling so little—then, gradually, blankness & disappointment; then a depression I could not rouse myself from all that day. When I began to write, it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it.”

In February and March—the beginning of the academic year in New Zealand—the schools will open up again and the girls in blue uniforms will return to my old College in Thorndon; they’ll lounge in the Memorial Gardens just as we used to do. Another year ahead, what will it bring? For Katherine Mansfield, this was always an exciting time, even in the depths of a northern hemisphere winter. Towards the end of 1922, she’d joined the esoteric Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon in an attempt to understand herself, bring all the scattered “bits” of herself together and make peace with her illness.

The last diary entries describe her final acts of “here and there” thinking, as she put the small realities of her restricted life into a sort of dictionary she was creating. As O’Sullivan writes in his introduction to the last volume of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield , “There is no detail so poignant and so simply indicative of the life she was attempting to remake, as the list of Russian words and phrases she was trying to learn: “I was late because my fire did not burn. The sky was blue as in summer…The trees still have apples. Apple…”

The word, the Russian equivalent—the fact and the kind of fiction that is also the fact of language, the imaginative gesture of Mansfield’s writing, turning one thing into another, seems—it really does seem in these last moments as I am reading them—to save her. “When I pass the apple stalls,” she had written to her friend Dorothy Brett back in 1917, “I cannot help stopping and staring until I feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple too—and that at any moment I may produce an apple, miraculously, out of my own being like the conjurer produces an egg,” a process, she finishes, “of becoming…so thrilling that I can hardy breathe.”

Like all writers who have left something behind them—a place or a person, a country, a home—the counterfeit, the version on the page, can become the real. I guess my mother, unknowingly, taught me that, but I don’t know that the idea would have stayed with me as powerfully and as long if she had not been taught it first by a writer she loved.

Kirsty Gunn

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Where to start with: Katherine Mansfield

A century after her death, Mansfield’s stories still feel adventurous and sharp, and Virginia Woolf’s great rival makes sure her modernism remains engaging

K atherine Mansfield – the only writer, Virginia Woolf said, that she had ever been jealous of – was known for her modernist short stories that explored anxiety and sexuality. This month sees the 100th anniversary of her death so now is as good a time as any to get stuck in if you’ve never given the New Zealand writer a try before. Biographer Claire Harman suggests some good ways in.

The entry point

While Mansfield was a pioneering modernist, her writing was very accessible and she was critical of books that weren’t (she felt “stupefied” by Joyce’s Ulysses ) . She was also, exclusively, a short story writer, so if you dislike one of her inventions, it is easy to move on to another. The collection to start with is The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922 when she was at the peak of her powers. Her range and skill here is thrilling, from the lyricism of At the Bay and The Voyage to the waspish satire of Marriage à la Mode, the pathos of Life of Ma Parker or the surrealism of Miss Brill. The title story is one of her best known, told from the point of view of young Laura Sheridan, who is trying to do the right thing when a tragic accident threatens to disrupt a family party. There’s gaiety in it as well as genuine darkness, with the Edwardian middle-class world of the Sheridan family evoked in loving detail but undercut by events happening just off-stage. And the ending is wonderfully ambivalent, as it is so often in Mansfield’s work.

The one to make you laugh out loud

The Daughters of the Late Colonel always seems to me a perfect example of short fiction: clever, subtle, poignant and as satisfying as a whole novel. The title characters are two middle-aged spinsters whose overbearing father has just died, leaving them to take responsibility for themselves for the first time. Their hesitancy about everything – even simple tasks such as ordering food and sorting out their father’s things – are a source of droll humour throughout, but the scene where their nephew Cyril has to make small talk about meringues is one of the funniest ever, masterfully set up and executed. Mansfield loved performing and was a great mimic and raconteur, but she is never just funny; this story ends on a mystical note, with an overwhelming sense of the pathos of the sisters’ situation.

The one you’ll learn from

Mansfield’s journals were published soon after her death by her widower, John Middleton Murry, and made an enormous impression on the reading public (though he was also widely criticised for exposing too much of her private life). They are part-notebook, part-diary and completely fascinating; you don’t just witness a writer at work, but share her inmost thoughts, which are often quite harsh with herself and others (she thought Henry James’s novels, for example, contained “an extraordinary amount of pan and an amazingly raffiné flash”). One of Mansfield’s most impressive characteristics was her lack of complacency. She always wanted to develop and improve, which comes over strongly in the journals. Few writers are so dedicated to craft; she’d spend hours getting a paragraph right.

The one that deserves more attention

Mansfield led a reckless life in her teens and 20s, “going every sort of hog”, as Virginia Woolf remarked disapprovingly, in a frantic quest for experience. This resulted in unwanted pregnancies, illnesses and rejection by her family and Mansfield’s stories are full of girls in similar straits: impoverished, threatened or ostracised. Her decision to write about sex and its perils was bold and hasn’t been given enough attention. There are assaults and attempted rapes in Juliet, The Little Governess and His Sister’s Keeper, but a particularly shocking instance is in The Swing of the Pendulum, which appeared in Mansfield’s first book, In a German Pension, in 1911. Mansfield’s earliest biographer, Antony Alpers, found the story disturbing and excluded it from his 1984 collection on the grounds of “crudity”, so it hasn’t had much exposure and I’ve never seen it discussed by scholars. But if there was ever a #MeToo story a hundred years ahead of its time, it is this one: when consensual flirting turns quickly to non-consensual sex, the girl in the story shouts and struggles, only to be met with “an expression of the most absurd determination” from her attacker; “he did not even look at her – but rapped out in a sharp voice: ‘Keep quiet – keep quiet’.”

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The masterpiece

Prelude is Mansfield’s longest and most ambitious story, a series of interconnected vignettes tracing a few days in the Burnell household following their move to a semi-rural suburb (the setting is based on one of Mansfield’s childhood homes in New Zealand). There’s no plot, no “closure”, no moral, but a powerful flow of ideas and impressions, shown by Mansfield to exist as much in everyday life as anywhere and in children’s minds as interestingly as in adults’. The term “stream of consciousness” hadn’t been invented when she wrote this story (begun in 1915), but Virginia Woolf, who commissioned it for the Hogarth Press and typeset the text, learned a lot from Mansfield’s startlingly novel techniques. The two women were almost friends in 1918-20 but wary of each other, being, as Mansfield said, “after very nearly the same thing”. When Mansfield died, Woolf admitted in her diary to “a shock of relief” at having lost her most serious rival.

If you’re left wanting more …

Mansfield published more than 100 short stories during her life, but died so young (aged 34) that you might well be left hankering for more. If so, try the letters. She wrote thousands of them in the years following her diagnosis with tuberculosis, when she was travelling almost constantly in search of better doctors and better climates. Beautifully edited in scholarly editions from both OUP and Edinburgh, they form a wonderfully immersive sort of autobiography, more upbeat than the journals (since she was almost always trying to put on a brave face on things) and full of wonderful descriptions of places, colours, sounds and light. Mansfield was superb at “noticings” (a word coined by one of her more unexpected fans, Philip Larkin); that great gift of immediacy makes you feel as if you are just there with her and the letters might in fact be addressed to you .

• Where to start with
• Short stories

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