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Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 - 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer, essayist and journalist, widely considered one of the most influential and important authors of the modernist movement. Her works are celebrated across the world, and have been published in 25 languages.
Born and raised in a house on Thorndon's Tinakori Road, Wellington, Mansfield was third eldest child in the Beauchamp family. After being raised by her parents and her beloved grandmother, she began school in Karori with her sisters before attending Wellington Girls College. The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends with Maata Mahapuku, who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship.
Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety, sexuality and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917, and she died in France aged 34. |
