Katherine Mansfield Biography and List of Works

New Zealand's most famous writer, who was closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and something of a rival to Virginia Woolf. Mansfield's creative years were burdened with loneliness, illness, jealousy, alienation - all this reflected in her work with the bitter depiction of marital and family relationships. Her short stories are noted for their use of stream of consciousness and sharp portraits of characters. She often depicted everyday events in the lives of ordinary people.

"Henry was a great fellow for books. He did not read many nor did he possess above half a dozen. He looked at all in the Charing Cross Road during lunch-time and at any odd time in London; the quantity with which he was on nodding terms was amazing. By his clean neat handling of them and by his nice choice of phrase when discussing them with one or another bookseller you would have thought that he had taken his pap with a tome propped before his nurse's bosom. But you would have been wrong."
(from 'Something Childish But Very Natural')

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a middle-class colonial family. Her father was a banker and her mother a genteel. She lived for six years in the rural village of Karori. As a first step in her rebellion against her background, she withdrew to London in 1903 and studied at the Queen's College, where she joined the staff of the College Magazine. Then she took up music in New Zealand in 1906. Her father denied her the opportunity of becoming a professional cello player despite a natural and obvious talent. Her lifelong friend Ida Baker persuaded Mansfield's father to allow Katherine to move back to England in 1908, with an allowance of £100 a year. There she devoted herself to writing. Mansfield never visited New Zealand again.

After an unhappy marriage with George Brown, whom she left a few days after the wedding, Mansfield toured for a while as an extra in opera and spent some time in Bavaria, where 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. On her return to London in 1910, Mansfield became ill with an untreated sexually transmitted disease, a condition which contributed to her weak health for the rest of her life.

In 1911 Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, a Socialist and former literary critic, who was first a tenant on her flat, then her lover. Mansfield co-edited and contributed to a series of journals. Until 1914 she published stories in Rhythm and The Blue Review. In 1918 she divorced from her first husband and married John Murry. In the same year she was found to have tuberculosis. When her only brother died in World War I, Mansfield focused her writing on New Zealand, re-creating in her fiction members of her family, grandmother, her parents, her brother 'Chummie.' She and Murry became closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda.

In her last years Mansfield lived much of her time in southern France and in Switzerland, seeking relief from tuberculosis. Without the company of friends, family, or her husband, she wrote much about her own roots and her childhood. Mansfield died of a pulmonary haemorrhage on January 9, 1923, in Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau, France.

Her family memoirs were collected in Bliss (1920), which secured her reputation as a writer. In the next two years she did her best work, achieving her high-spot with the Garden Party (1922). During her life only three volumes of her stories were published. Mansfield's famous short stories include 'Bliss' (1918), dealing with the subject of infidelity, 'The Man Without a Temperament' (1920), in which a husband becomes painfully aware that his relationship with his wife has deteriorated to 'rot', and 'The Garden Party' (1921), in which an extravagant garden-party coincides with the accidental death of a local working-class man, and the daughter of the party's hostess is touched by a newborn social conscience.

Mansfield was greatly influenced by Anton Chechov, sharing his warm humanity, sensitive characterization and subtle choice of detail. Her influence on the development of the short story as a form of literature was also notable. Among her literary friends were Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, who considered her over-praised, and D.H. Lawrence, who later turned against Murry and her. Mansfield's journal, letters, and scrapbook were edited by her husband.

For further reading: The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry by J.M. Murry (1936); Katherine Mansfield by S. Daly (1965); The Fiction of Katherine Mansfield by M. Magalanr (1971); Life of Katherine Mansfield by R.E. Mantz (1974); The Life of Katherine Mansfield by A. Alpers (1980); Katherine Mansfield by C. Hanson and A. Gurr (1981); A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield by B.J. Kirkpatrick (1990); Katherine Mansfield by Jane Phillimore (1990); Katherine Mansfield: A Study of Her Shorter Fiction by J.F. Kobler (1990); Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. by L Rhoda B. Nathan (1993); Katherine Mansfield's Fiction by Patrick D. Morrow (1993); Illness, Gender, and Writing by Mary Burgan (1994); Katherine Mansfield by Saralyn R. Daly (1994); The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Jan Pilditch (1995); Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by Angela Smith (1999)

John Middleton Murry (1889-1957), writer and critic, born in London. He studied at Oxford, and edited the Athenaeum (1919-21), Adelphi (1923-48), Peace News (1940-46). His major works include studies on Keats and Shakespeare (1925), D.H.Lawrence (1931), William Blake (1933), and Swift (1954). Towards the end of his life he became interested in agriculture, and he established a community farm in Norfolk.

In a German Pension, (1911)