Katherine Mansfield

Mansfield’s early school years were spent in Karori, a village in the hills a few miles from Wellington, until the Beauchamps returned to Wellington, when she was 11. At first she attended Wellington GC, then Miss Swainson’s private school. In 1903 Beauchamp, now director of the Bank of New Zealand, chose Queen’s College, Harley Street, London, to add metropolitan polish to his clever and handsome daughter. She immersed herself in French, German and music, and began writing sketches and prose poems. In the Queen’s College Magazine she published ‘About Pat’, her first re-creation of childhood in Karori, written in direct and simple prose, as well as ‘Die Einsame’, redolent with fin-de-siècle motifs and symboliste elaboration of mood.



Kathleen Beauchamp returned to Wellington, in late 1906. Although her life was comfortable and socially expansive she found Wellington understandably provincial. She filled what she later called ‘great complaining notebooks’, published her first work under noms de plume in Australia, and moved through a number of furtive infatuations with men and women.  

Her father accepted her plea for musical training in England and she arrived again in London in August 1908, ‘Katherine Mansfield’ already decided on as her pen-name.



Within weeks life was again complex and sophisticated.



She fell in love with Garnet Trowell, a young violinist whose father had taught her the cello in Wellington. When the affair collapsed some months later, she impulsively married G.C. Bowden, a singing teacher whose name she officially bore for the next nine years, but whom she left the day after the marriage. She returned to Garnet and his opera company, became pregnant, and again separated.

During those months she depended, as she was to do for the rest of her life, on her close but exasperating friendship with Ida Baker, her Rhodesian school chum from Queen’s College.



After the birth of a stillborn child, Mansfield stayed on in Germany until the next January. She formed a liaison of sorts with the Polish translator, journalist and con-man, Floryan Wyspiansky. Later he would attempt to blackmail her with letters she wrote at this time, but he encouraged her to read Russian writers, especially Chekhov, and was indirectly responsible for her finest poem, ‘To Stanislaw Wyspiansky’. Ostensibly a tribute to a Polish patriot and poet, it prompted her to consider her own country, ‘Making its own history, slowly and clumsily / Piecing together this and that, finding the pattern, solving the problem, / Like a child with a box of bricks’ and remarking of herself, with a Whitmanesque bravura, ‘I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood’.



The months in Bavaria also provided the occasion for the satirical stories she began contributing to A.R. Orage’s journal, the New Age, once she was back in England. The stories spared neither Germans nor family life, and presented sex, pregnancy and social divisions with almost ferocious candour.  Mansfield took her most decisive turn when, at the end of 1911, she met the precociously gifted, Oxford undergraduate, John Middleton Murry. He was already the founding editor of Rhythm, a quarterly dedicated to the spirit of Modernism, an escape from both Englishness and aestheticism. It was a call that brought from Mansfield the small group of New Zealand stories that depicted the emotional and physical violence of raw colonial life. In ‘The *Woman at the Store’, ‘Millie’ and ‘Ole Underwood’, she moved the popular colonial low-brow yarn towards a fresh psychological depth and an awareness of impressionist technique. In a much-quoted sentence from ‘The Woman at the Store’, which Allen Curnow took up as epigraph to his Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), she noted ‘There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw.’



Within weeks of meeting, Mansfield and Murry had set up house together, assuming the literary role of ‘the two tigers’, and begun their habit of addressing each other as Tig and Wig. Her new allegiances drew a series of savage satirical attacks in Orage’s portrait of her as ‘Mrs Foisacre’ in the New Age. When Rhythm folded in mid-1913, she and Murry jointly edited the three issues of its successor, the Blue Review. Soon after they began an intense and troubled friendship with D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley, at whose marriage they featured as official witnesses.



Soon after the outbreak of World War 1, they moved to Great Missenden, with the Lawrences not far off, and Mansfield began her lasting friendship with the Ukrainian Jew, S.S. Koteliansky. When her relationship with Murry seemed close to falling apart, she set out for Paris in early 1915, to the borrowed apartment of the French novelist, journalist and committed bohemian Francis Carco. But first she visited Carco at Gray, in the Zone des Armées where he was posted. The brief affair contributed to her war story, ‘An Indiscreet Journey’, as did Carco himself to the cynical roué, Raoul Duquette, three years later in her ‘cry against corruption’, ‘Je ne parle pas français’.



For the Autumn issue of the Signature, a short-lived periodical put together by Murry and Lawrence, she wrote ‘The Wind Blows’, an exquisitely controlled re-creation of the Wellington of her girlhood. But the enduring motive for a return to New Zealand settings, was the death of her brother in Belgium in October 1915.

Two years later, when Virginia Woolf asked for a story for her Hogarth Press, Mansfield reshaped The Aloe into Prelude (1918). Now a shorter fiction in twelve discrete sections that cut and overlap in a method she derived from cinema, it ran together symbolism and realism with a vivid emotional resonance, achieving ‘that special prose’ she equated with both elegy and celebration. .



She grew closer to Lady Ottoline Morrell and, more cautiously, to Virginia Woolf. For a time Maynard Keynes was her landlord, Lytton Strachey was attracted to her because she was like a Japanese doll, Bertrand Russell admired her mind and attempted an affair, while T.S. Eliot warned Ezra Pound she was ‘a dangerous woman’. But Mansfield’s wary colonial elusiveness allowed more relaxed friendships with artists and the mildly eccentric—for a time, with the East End painter Mark Gertler, and the androgynous Carrington; more enduringly, from 1912 onwards with the Scottish painter J.D. Fergusson, and the American Anne Estelle Rice, whose portrait of her is in the National Museum in Wellington; and increasingly with the deaf aristocrat, Dorothy Brett, who also painted. But it was illness, rather than choice, that led to her gradual separation from most of her friends in England.



With various winterings-over in Bandol, Ospedaletti, San Remo and Menton, and summers back in Hampstead, Mansfield accumulated enough stories to put together Bliss and Other Stories (1920). In early 1919 Murry had taken over editorship of the Athenaeum and separation, reuniting, and again separation established itself as the rhythm of their lives, while there flowed between them a highly charged correspondence.  

Her vivacity and frankness as a correspondent increasingly prompts critics to value her letters as highly as her fiction. Taken with her numerous notebooks, they offer a richly detailed account of a modern woman’s engagement with love, art, solitude, impending death and war. ‘The war is in all of us,’ she wrote, even after hostilities were over, as she increasingly drew an analogy between the corruptions of civilisation and her own physical decay.



After a brief return to Sierre, and two months in London, Mansfield entered the Gurdjieff Institute for Harmonious Development at Fontainebleau. Commentators and biographers remain troubled by her decision to place herself under the direction of a guru who is often presented unsympathetically, and to live in a commune of Russians and truth-seekers—‘my people at last’, as she called them. Although Gurdjieff treated her kindly, she was by no means a disciple. Her quest was very much along personal lines, a movement against what she regarded as the crippling intellectualism of post-war European life. In almost her last letter, she declared her goal to be total honesty. ‘If I were allowed one single cry to God, that cry would be: I want to be REAL.’ She died at Fontainebleau on 9 January 1923, a few weeks before the publication of The Garden Party and Other Stories, which confirmed her place among the Modernists of her generation.



(extracts from nzbookcouncil)