KATHERINE MANSFIELD

INTRODUCTION Born : 14 October 1888

Wellington, New Zealand Died : 9 January 1923

(34 aged) Pen Name : Katherine Mansfield

Nationality : New Zealand

Literary : Modernismmovement

Spouse :

George Bowden

John Middleton Murry

Partner :

Ida Constance Baker

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction, who was born and brought up in New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19 Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as;

Early Life Katherine mansfield was Kathleen

Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 into a socially prominent family.

Her father was a banker. Her father Harold Beauchamp became the chairman of the bank of New Zealand. Her grandfather was Arthur Beauchamp, who briefly represented the Picton electorate in Parliament.

In 1893 the Mansfield family moved Thornton to Karori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood.

EARLY WORK:

In 1903 she moved to London, where she attended Queen’s College along with her sisters. Mansfield recommended playing the Cello, an occupation that she believed she would take up professionally. But she also began contributing to the college newspaper, with such dedication that she eventually became its editor.

She met fellow writer Ida Baker a south African, at the college and they become lifelong friends.

Mansfield did not become involved in much political activity, when she lived in London. For example ‘she did not actively support the “suffragette” movement in the UK.

After finishing her schooling in England , she returned to New Zealand in 1906, and only then began to write short stories

When she went back to London in 1908, she published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months there.

She had several works published in Australia, her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her heart set on becoming a professional writer. It was the first occasion on which she used the pen name “Katherine Mansfield”

Life style: she rapidly wearied of the provincial New

Zealand lifestyle and of her family, and two years later headed again London.

Her father sent her an annual allowance of 100 pounds for the rest of her life.

She wanted to go back to the New Zealand but due to T.B she was not able to go back.

When she went back in London in 1908 she quickly fell into a Bohemian way of life.

Katherine Mansfield’s Relationships

Mansfield had two romantic relationships with women, but she continued to have male lovers and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times.

Her first same gender romantic relationship was with Maata Mahupuku, a wealthy young woman whom she had first met at Miss Swanson's School and than again in London in 1906. In june 1907 she wrote: “I want maata, I want her as I have had her, terribly, this is unclean I know but true”. She wrote about Maata in several short stories. Maata married in 1907 but it is claimed that she sent money to her in London.

The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908.

She was having passionate affair with Garnet. By early 1909 she had become pregnant by Garnet.

She hastily entered into a marriage with George Bowden, a singing teacher 11 years older than she. They were married on 2 march, but she left him the same evening, before the marriage could be consummated. The reason of the breakdown of the marriage to Bowden was an lesbian relationship between Katherine and baker. She miscarried after attempting to lift a suitcase on top of a cupboard.

In 1914 katherine Mansfield had a brief affair with the French writer, Francis Carco.

Katherine Mansfield visited him in Paris in February

1915.

That visit retold in one of her short stories “An Indiscreet Journey”.

Death of Her Brother Katherine Mansfield life and work were

changed by the death in 1915 of her beloved younger brother LESLIE HERON.

She began to take refuge in nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand.

In a poem describing a dream she wrote after his death: “By the remembered stream my brother stands waiting for me with berries in his hands…these are my body; sister, take and eat”

Katherine Mansfield Married Life

At the beginning of 1917 Katherine Mansfield and Murry separated, although he continued to visit her at her new apartment.

By April Mansfield divorced from Bowden and been finalized, and she and Murry married. They came together again.

In 1919 Murry became editor of Athenaeum for which Mansfield wrote more than 100 book reviews.

During the winter of 1918-19 she and Baker stayed in a villa in San Remo, Italy.

Their relationship with Murry became increasingly distant after 1918.

Themes

The difficulties and ambivalences of families and sexuality.

The fragility and vulnerability of relationships.

The complexities and insensitivities of the rising middle class.

The social consequences of war. Overwhelmingly the attempt to extract

whatever beauty and vitality and increasingly difficult experience.

Language and Style

Her language was clear and precise.

Her emotions and reaction to experience carefully distilled and resonant.

Her use of image and symbol were sharp and suggestive.

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf alternately disapproved of and envied Mansfield’s wider and more amorphous sexual, economic and social experience and who was both her principal rival and close friend in a shifting, difficult intense, and communicative relationship, always respected and learned from Katherine Mansfield. When she heard that Katherine Mansfield had died, Woolf wrote in her diary: “I was jealous of her writing, the only writing, I have ever been jealous of”.

Final Years

In October 1922 she moved to George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious

Development of Man in France, where she was put under the

care ofOlgivanna Lazovitch Hinzenburg.

In February 1922 she consulted the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin whose revolutionary treatment

which consisted of bombarding her Spleen

with x-rays, caused her to develop heat flashes and

numbness in legs

Katherine Mansfield was suffering with T.B.

Katherine Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage in January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs.

She died on 9 January.

Katherine Mansfield was buried in a Avon.

Katherine Mansfield was a prolific writer in the final years of her life. Much of her work remained unpublished at her death, and Murry took on the task of editing and publishing it in two additional volumes of short stories.