One of New Zealand’s greatest writers

Prepared by John Horsefield, Cowra U3A

It is only in more recent decades, as the short story has come to be seen
as more deserving of close study, that Katherine Mansfield’s achievements
and modernist affinities have been recognised.

Katherine Mansfield was a your life? … You are blind, and far worse,
prominent New Zealand modernist writer you are deaf to all that is worth living for.’
of short fiction. She was born Kathleen
Mansfield Beauchamp on 14 October
1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, into a
socially prominent family.
Her father, Harold Beauchamp,
was a successful businessman and her
mother, Annie Burnell née Dyer, was of
genteel origins. She was also a first cousin
of authoress Countess Elizabeth Von
Arnim. By the time of Katherine’s adoles-
cence, her father had become a director of
the Bank of New Zealand.
Her mother has been described as
‘delicate and aloof’, with a gift for un-
thinking pronouncements. Her first words
to her artistic daughter, on returning from
nine months in England, were, ‘Well,
Katherine, I see that you are as fat as
ever.’
Katherine had a lonely and alien-
ated childhood. She lived for six years in
the rural village of Karori. Later on she
said ‘I imagine I was always writing.
Twaddle it was, too. But better far write
twaddle or anything, anything, than noth-
ing at all.’ Her first published stories ap-
Her juvenilia are no more or less peared in the High School Reporter and
mawkish than the youthful work of any the Wellington Girls' High School maga-
writer; what is occasionally noteworthy is zine, in 1898 and 1899. As a first step to
the degree to which the future figure of her rebellion against her background,
the artist can be heard sounding her char- Katherine withdrew to London in 1902
acteristic notes. and studied at Queen's College, where she
Here is an extract from an aban- joined the staff of the College Magazine.
doned novel: ‘Live this life, Juliet. Did Writing to a school friend at the
Chopin fear to satisfy the cravings of his age of 16, Katherine set out her pro-
nature, his natural desires? No, that is how gramme: ‘I’m so keen upon all women
he is so great. Why do you push away just having a definite future – are not you? The
that which you need —because of conven- idea of sitting and waiting for a husband is
tion? Why do you dwarf your nature, spoil absolutely revolting and it really is the
attitude of a great many girls. … It rather

1
made me smile to read of your wishing times I have felt just the same. I just long
you could create your fate—O how many for power over circumstances.’
The longing was expressed in such
acts as wearing brown to match the colour
of her beloved cello. A talented cellist, she
was not at first attracted to literature, and
after finishing her schooling in England,
she returned to her New Zealand home in
1906.
Katherine then took up music, and
had affairs with both men and women.
Her father denied her the opportunity to
become a professional cello player—she
was an accomplished violoncellist. In a
letter she wrote in 1906 she said: ‘Would
you not like to try all sorts of lives—one
is so very small—but that is the satisfac-
tion of writing—one can impersonate so
many people.’
In 1908 she studied typing and
bookkeeping at Wellington Technical Col-
lege. It was during this time that Katherine
began writing short stories. Her lifelong
friend Ida Baker (LM, Leslie Moore in her
With sister Jeanne and brother Leslie. diary and correspondence) persuaded
Katherine's father to allow Katherine to
move back to England, with an allowance
of £100 a year. There she devoted herself
to writing. She never visited New Zealand
again.
In the context of a long and ardu-
ous sea journey—six or seven weeks—
this might not appear significant. And yet
by the time her father, who had been born
in Australia, came to write his memoirs,
he could boast that he had made the trip
‘back’ to Mother England 24 times.
In yet another self-addressed jour-
nal manifesto, she wrote of the need to get
rid of ‘the doctrine that love is the only
thing in the world. … We must get rid of
that bogey—and then, then comes the op-
portunity of happiness and freedom.’
On her return to London in 1908,
Katherine quickly fell into the bohemian/-
bisexual way of life lived by many artists
and writers of that era. With little money,
she met, married and left her first hus-
band, George Bowden, all within just
Katherine in Brussels, 1906. three weeks.

2
 Katherine toured for a while as an natically humourless, routinely conde-
extra in opera. Before the marriage she scending, and always eating.
had an affair with Garnett Trowell, a pro- The narrator observes of one Frau
fessional violinist and family friend from who is affecting to be shocked: ‘If it had
New Zealand. Around this time, she be- not been for her fork I think she would
came pregnant by Trowell, and her mother have crossed herself.’ Seeking purity and
sent her to Bavarian health spa. However good health, they always give themselves
in 1909, while she was there, she suffered away through unconsciously polluting
a miscarriage, possibly brought on by lift- acts: ‘Prompted by the thought, he wiped
ing her trunk off the top of a wardrobe. his neck and face with his dinner napkin
Her mother had arrived in London and carefully cleaned his ears.’
to ‘sort out’ the business of Katherine’s The narrator is an attractively dry,
close friendship with an old Queen’s Col- English-speaking outsider who has simply
lege friend, Ida Baker. Mother was to turn up at mealtime to be presented
wrong—there was nothing ‘unwhole- with another amusingly offensive out-
some’ in the relationship, at least not burst. At one point she is offered cherries
along the lines she imagined. by an absurd music professor, who tells
Ida Baker, variously nicknamed her: ‘There is nothing like cherries for
Jones, the Albatross, the Cornish Pasty, producing free saliva after trombone play-
the Faithful One, became Katherine’s life- ing, especially after Grieg’s Ich Liebe
long helpmate, nursemaid and whipping Dich’.
post. Her devotion was unwavering in the Katherine also contracted gonor-
face of some extraordinary insults and un- rhoea around this time, an event that was
kindnesses. Katherine found Ida’s self- to plague her with arthritic pain for the
sacrifice galling and irritating; she also rest of her short life, as well as to make
understood the large debt she owed her her view herself as a 'soiled' woman. She
and was constantly admonishing herself attended literary parties without much en-
for these sentiments. thusiasm: ‘Pretty rooms and pretty people,
In a letter of 1922, she wrote to pretty coffee, and cigarettes out of a silver
Ida: ‘I am simply unworthy of friendship. tankard. … I was wretched.’
… I take advantage of you—demand per- In 1910 Katherine saw the famous
fection of you—crush you … ’ Eight Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London
years earlier in a journal entry, thinking and later recalled the effect Van Gogh’s
about Ida, she wonders whether she has Sunflowers had on her own practice. The
‘ruined her happy life?’ painting, she wrote, ‘taught me something
Back in England in 1910, her work about writing that was queer, a kind of
drew the attention of several publishing freedom—or rather a shaking free.’
houses, and she took on the pen-name Also in 1910, after attending a
Katherine Mansfield. During her stay in Japanese cultural exhibition, she took to
Germany she had written satirical wearing a pink kimono. During her brief
sketches of German characters, which Russian phase, she toyed with a fresh set
were published in 1911 under the title In a of names for herself, ‘Katharina’,
German Pension. ‘Yekaterina’ and ‘Katya’.
This showed Katherine on the of- In 1911 Katherine met John Mid-
fensive. Stories such as ‘Germans at dleton Murray, a Socialist and former lit-
Meat’, ‘The Baron’ and ‘The Modern erary critic, who was first a tenant in her
Soul’ gleefully skewer the pomposities flat, then her lover. Murray edited a new
and self-deceptions of the spa-going Ger- avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. The
man middle class. The Germans are fa- journal’s slogan, taken from the Irish
playwright JM Synge, set out the terms of

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 to the oeuvre, being ‘the first New Zea-
land stories to thread human behaviour
with the brooding grimness of landscape.’
‘The Woman at the Store’, a kind
of colonial murder ballad in which the so-
cial isolation of rural life breeds despair
and violence, contributed this much-
quoted sentence to the dictionary of defi-
nitions a country keeps of itself : ‘There is
no twilight in our New Zealand days, but
a curious half-hour when everything ap-
pears grotesque—it frightens—as though
the savage spirit of the country walked
abroad and sneered at what it saw.’
She co-edited and contributed to a
series of journals. Rhythm folded in 1913,
to be replaced by a new venture, the short-
lived Blue Review, jointly edited by
Katherine and Murray. The collapse of
this second journal caused them financial
Katherine wearing an Arabian shawl, stress, forcing the couple to return to Lon-
1910 don from Paris, where they hoped to es-
tablish themselves as writers. The material
insecurity of their lives, mixed with the
volatility of their own natures, initiated a
lifelong pattern of partings and reconcilia-
tions.
During the war she travelled rest-
lessly between England and France. In
one of the more notorious of these
‘flights’, Katherine made a daring trip to
visit her lover, Francis Carco, a writer and
‘committed Bohemian’, in the French war
zone.
With John Middleton Murray A fictional version of this trip can
be read in her story ‘An Indiscreet Jour-
engagement, ‘Before art can be human ney’. While Carco pops up again as the
again it must learn to be brutal.’ cynical narrator of ‘Je ne parle pas Fran-
Katherine submitted a lightweight cais’. Carco, for his part, made Katherine
story to Rhythm. The story was rejected by the model of a character in his own novel,
Murray, who requested something darker. Les Innocents: ‘She was a small, slim
She responded with ‘The Woman at the woman, pleasant but distant, her large
Store’, a tale of murder and mental illness dark eyes looked everywhere at once.’
that Murray called ‘the best story by far In 1915 she met her beloved
that had been sent to Rhythm.’ Katherine’s younger brother Leslie, known as ‘Chum-
other main contributions were ‘Ole Un- mie’. When he died in World War I,
derwood’ and ‘Mollie’. Katherine was shocked and traumatised
For Vincent O’Sullivan, the noted by the experience. Speaking of the war
Katherine Mansfield scholar and writer, she wrote: ‘I feel in the profoundest sense
these often neglected pieces are essential that nothing can ever be the same—that as

4
artists, we are traitors if we feel otherwise:
we have to take it into account and find
new expressions, new moulds for our new
thoughts and feelings.’
Her work now began to take ref-
uge in the nostalgic reminiscences of their
childhood in New Zealand. During these
years, she also formed important profes-
sional friendships with writers such as DH
Lawrence, his wife Frieda and Virginia
Woolf who later claimed that her writing
was 'The only writing I have ever been
jealous of'.’
Katherine was drawn to Law-
rence—he was, after all, another outsider
in the English literary world—but her
journal also records her impatience with
what she saw as Lawrence’s reductive
view of human nature: ‘I shall never see
sex in trees, sex in the running brooks, sex
in stones & sex in everything. The number
of things that are really phallic from foun-
tain pen fillers onwards!’ Katherine’s brother Leslie, 1915
Lawrence, with whom she had a
fraught friendship, later visited Welling-
ton, her birthplace, and was moved to
send her a postcard bearing a single Italian
word, Ricordi (‘memories’). It was a small
and cryptic gesture of reconciliation;
they’d fallen out badly and in his previous
letter he had said ‘You are a loathsome
reptile—I hope you will die.’
‘Prelude' (1916), one of her most
famous stories, was also written during
this period. Katherine drew on her mother
for the character of the reclining, perpetu-
ally disappointed Burnell mother in ‘Prel-
ude’, pregnant again and victimised by
disturbing dreams of a bird swelling into a
baby ‘with a big naked head and a gaping
bird-mouth, opening and shutting.’
This 60-page story re-defined what
a story could do and be. The action in-
volves the Burnell family moving house
from the town to the nearby countryside.
Its autobiographical basis lies in the move
Katherine’s family made from Tinakori
Road in Wellington to Karori, 8 km away. Katherine in 1915
The story is told in 12 sections.
We enter an individual consciousness for

5
 the borderlessness of land and sea stand-
a few pages at a time before moving on to ing in for freedom and possibility:
someone else. We glide from adults to ‘Very early morning. The sun was
children and back again, and from the not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent
family to its servants. The story is a mira- Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist.
cle of fluidity. The big bush-covered hills at the back
Very little ‘happens’ but the story were smothered. You could not see where
is full of vivid personal crises that cru- they ended and the paddocks and bunga-
cially affect each character’s internal lows began. The sandy road was gone and
weather while leaving the atmosphere of the paddocks and bungalows the other
amiable, conventional family life intact: side of it; there were no white dunes cov-
the girl Kezia witnesses the killing of a ered with reddish grass beyond them;
chicken; Kezia’s unmarried and desper- there was nothing to mark which was the
ately timid Aunt Beryl recalls with horror beach and where was the sea. A heavy
coquettishly leaning against her sister’s dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big
husband when he was reading the paper; drops hung on the bushes and just did not
Linda, Kezia’s mother, fearful of being fall. …’
swallowed by family life, imagines the Her health declined further after a
wallpaper is coming alive. near-fatal attack of pleurisy when she con-
In an ecstatic letter written around tracted tuberculosis in 1917. Although she
the time she was working on the story, continued writing between her first and
Katherine identified the form as her own second collections, she rarely published
invention and used the language of im- her work, and sank into depression. In
pressionism to suggest what she was aim- 1918 Katherine divorced her first husband
ing for: and married John Murray.
‘You know, if the truth were
known I have a perfect passion for the is-
land where I was born. Well, in the early
morning there I always remember feeling
that this little island has dipped back into
the dark blue sea during the night only to
rise again at gleam of day, all hung with
bright spangles and glittering drops. … I
tried to catch that moment. … I tried to lift
that mist from my people and let them be
seen and then to hide them again.’
The tenderness of this statement
represents a dramatic shift in Katherine.
Though there was social commentary,
‘Prelude’—like its companion piece ‘At
the Bay’—lacked the full protective ar-
mour of satire. Its insights were not ar-
rived at through the observations of an
outsider but mediated magically, it seems,
through a floating narrator with access to
the interior dramas of each personality.
The intimacy was startling.
Her undiscovered home country
could rise into view as Crescent Bay does
in the famous opening of ‘At the Bay’ -

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 cures for her tuberculosis. In February
Katherine at the Villa Isola Bella, 1920 1922, she consulted the Russian physician
Ivan Manoukhin. His ‘revolutionary’
It was while combating the disease treatment, which consisted of bombarding
in health spas across Europe, suffering a her spleen with X-rays, caused her to de-
serious haemorrhage in 1918, that Kathe- velop heat flashes and numbness in her
rine began writing the works she would legs.
become best known for. In September As a part of her treatment in 1922
1920, Katherine moved to the Riviera at an institute, Katherine had to spend a
town of Menton, renting the Villa Isola few hours every day on a platform sus-
Bella, and entering one of her most pro- pended over a cow manger. She breathed
ductive periods. Here she wrote a group of odours emanating from below but the
stories that rank with her best work: ‘Miss treatment did no good.
Brill’, ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Daughters In October 1922, Katherine moved
of the Late Colonel’. to George Gurdjieff's Institute for the Har-
In December of that year, her sec- monious Development of Man in
ond book of stories, Bliss and Other Sto- Fontainebleau, France, where she was un-
ries, was published to enthusiastic re- der the care of Olgivanna Lazovitch
views. A few months later there was an- Hinzenburg (later, Mrs Frank Lloyd
other move—this time to a mountainside Wright).
chalet in Switzerland. Here she wrote Gurdjieff’s basic thesis was that
some of her best-known stories: ‘Her First the harmony of life had been disrupted by
Ball’, ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Doll’s the pressures of modern living. His com-
House’. mune was an attempt to restore balance
When Murray had an affair with through a regime that included physical
the Princess Bibesco (née Asquith), exercise and labour. Residents were en-
Katherine objected not to the affair but to couraged to walk about with arms out-
her letters to Murray: ‘I am afraid you stretched for long periods, take part in
must stop writing these love letters to my dances, and rise early in the morning to do
husband while he and I live together. It is communal work.
one of the things which is not done in our None of this, of course, would
world’ (from a letter to Princess Bibesco, have been an ideal regime for a TB suf-
1921). ferer. However, Katherine’s TB was by
‘Miss Brill’, the bittersweet story this stage so advanced that Gurdjieff’s
of a fragile woman living an ephemeral methods are thought to have had no effect
life of observation and simple pleasures in on her decline. Katherine, for her part, be-
Paris, established Katherine as one of the lieved she’d found ‘my people at last’.
pre-eminent writers of the Modernist pe- The final months of her life pro-
riod, upon its publication in 1920's Bliss. duced little fiction, though she did com-
The title story from that collection, plete ‘The Fly’, a portrait of her father and
‘Bliss’, which involved a similar character her classic statement on the futility of war.
facing her husband's infidelity, also found Two weeks before Katherine died, she ex-
critical acclaim. She followed with the pressed, with characteristic restlessness,
equally praised collection, The Garden her dissatisfaction and her ambition: ‘I
Party, published in 1922. want much more material; I am tired of
In 1922 she should have been se- my little stories like birds bred in cages.’
cure, buoyant. In fact, her health was get- Katherine suffered a fatal pulmo-
ting worse and she was now looking for a nary haemorrhage in January 1923 in
miracle cure. Katherine spent her last Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau.
years seeking increasingly unorthodox Her last words were: ‘I love the rain. I

7
want the feeling of it on my face.’ She does she come here at all—who wants
was buried in a cemetery in the Fontaine- her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old
bleau District in the town of Avon. mug at home?’ Miss Brill hurries back
She proved to be a prolific writer home, unclasps the neckpiece quickly, and
in the final years of her life, and much of puts it in the box. But when she put the lid
her prose and poetry remained unpub- on she thought she heard something cry-
lished at her death. The peak of her ing.
achievement was The Garden Party In 'The Garden Party' (1921) an
(1922), which she wrote during the final extravagant garden-party is arranged on a
stages of her illness. Without the company beautiful day. Laura, the daughter of the
of her literary friends, family, or her hus- party's hostess, hears of the accidental
band, she wrote much about her own roots death of a young local working-class man,
and her childhood. Murray took on the Mr Scott. The man lived in the neighbour-
task of editing and publishing her works. hood. Laura wants to cancel the party, but
His efforts resulted in two addi- her mother refuses to understand. She fills
tional volumes of short stories in 1923 a basket with sandwiches, cakes, pastries
(The Dove's Nest) and in 1924 (Something and other food, goes to the widow's house,
Childish), as well as her Poems, The Aloe, and sees the dead man in the bedroom
a collection of critical writings (Novels where he is lying.
and Novelists) and a number of editions of He was wonderful, beautiful.
her previously unpublished letters and While they were laughing and while the
journals. band was playing, this marvel had come to
The sickly sweet Katherine created the lane. Crying she tells her brother who
by Murray was difficult to swallow. In is looking for her: ‘It was simply marvel-
1937, the American writer Katherine lous. But, Laurie - ' She stopped, she
Anne Porter issued this warning: ‘She is looked at her brother. 'Isn't life,' she
in danger of the worst fate an artist can stammered, 'isn't life - ' But what life was
suffer—to be overwhelmed by her own she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite
legend.’ Fortunately, the legend was made understood.
more life-like by subsequent and fuller Katherine was always concerned
editions of her Journal and by more com- with notions of authenticity. As an early
plete selections of her Letters. devotee of Oscar Wilde she was thor-
Katherine Mansfield is widely oughly versed in the idea of the ‘mask’—
considered one of the best short story the false self, the social self behind which
writers of her period. A number of her the ‘real’ self sat, watching and judging
works, including ‘Miss Brill’, ‘Prelude’, and rejecting.
‘The Garden Party’, ‘The Doll's House’, As a schoolgirl she had copied
and later works such as ‘The Fly’, are fre- Wilde’s epigrams into her notebook: ‘Be-
quently collected in short story antholo- ing natural is simply a pose—and the most
gies. irritating pose I know.’ She took from
'Miss Brill' was about a woman Wilde a kind of delight in the artificiality
who enjoys the beginning of the Season. of the mask; if one had to hide, it may as
She goes to her ‘special’ seat with her fur. well be cleverly and knowingly done.
She had taken it out of its box in the after- Katherine also proved ahead of her
noon, shaken off the moth-powder, and time in her adoration of Russian play-
given it a brush. She feels that she has a wright Anton Chekhov, sharing his warm
part in the play in the park, and somebody humanity and attention to small details of
will notice if she isn't there. human behaviour. She incorporated some
A couple sits near her. The girl of his themes and techniques into her writ-
laughs at her fur and the man says: ‘Why ing. Her influence on the development of

8
the short story as a form of literature was Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biogra-
also notable. The fact that she died rela- pher, wrote that ‘Katherine haunted her as
tively young only added to her legacy. we are haunted by people we have loved,
Katherine Mansfield revolution- but with whom we have not completed
ised the 20th century English short story. our conversation, with whom we have un-
Her best work shakes itself free of plots finished business.’
and endings and gives the story, for the It is a formulation that captures
first time, the expansiveness of the interior wonderfully the current position of Kathe-
life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred rine Mansfield. She is a key figure in the
edges of personality. development of the short story and yet she
She is taught worldwide because remains somehow on the margins of liter-
of her historical importance but also be- ary history. She is also the great ghost of
cause her prose offers lessons in entering New Zealand cultural life, felt but not
ordinary lives that are still vivid and quite grasped.
strong. And her fiction retains its rele- Her relationship with her country
vance through its open-endedness—its of birth was, like most of her relation-
ability to raise discomforting questions ships, marked by extremes. In the begin-
about identity, belonging and desire. ning, as a precocious, literary schoolgirl,
In the words of one of her biogra- she despaired of her uncouth colonial
phers, ‘It was largely through her adven- home where ‘people don’t even know
turous spirit, her eagerness to grasp at ex- their alphabet’. As a mature writer she
perience and to succeed in her work, that found in that ‘hopeless’ material a way of
she became ensnared in disaster. … If she pushing the boundaries of the form—in
was never a saint, she was certainly a mar- the words of her biographer, Antony Al-
tyr, and a heroine in her recklessness, her pers, a means of ‘revolutionising the Eng-
dedication and her courage.’ lish short story’.
TS Eliot found her ‘a fascinating Her masterpieces—the long stories
personality’ but also ‘a thick-skinned ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly
toady’ and ‘a dangerous woman’. And if detailed recreations of a New Zealand
we want to add one more voice to this childhood, reports from the fringe—the
roll-call, the Irish writer Frank O’Connor, edge of the world as she felt it to be. She
in his classic study of the short story, The wrote as if she had stayed. Of course these
Lonely Voice, called Katherine ‘the brassy luminous re-imaginings are lit with the
little shopgirl of literature who made her- affection and nostalgia of the expatriate.
self into a great writer.’ They would not exist without their au-
The contemporary English novelist thor’s estrangement from the scenes and
and editor of the Oxford Companion to places and people she describes. They are
English Literature, Margaret Drabble, set in a New Zealand of the mind, com-
summed up Katherine lasting radical posed at the edge of Katherine’s memory.
spirit: ‘A symbol of liberation, innovation 'At the Bay' and 'Prelude' are her
and unconventionality. Her life was new, most innovative and widely-read works
her manners and dress were new, her art and as such they are often the only point
was new.’ of contact an international readership has
After Katherine died, Virginia with this obscure country at the bottom of
Woolf often dreamed at night of her great the world.
rival. The dreams gave her a Katherine The contemporary Katherine
who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that Mansfield is a figure of vivid contradic-
the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter re- tion—fiercely independent and patheti-
mained with Woolf for the next day. cally needy, brilliantly bold and wretch-
edly repentant, terrifically ambitious and

9
plagued by self-doubt. And these contra-
dictions are most vitally present in all her
thinking and writing about home, New
Zealand. The despised place could also be
the dream place. The empty place could
be imaginatively rich. The unschooled
land could teach the world.
Mount Roskill Grammar School in
Auckland, Rangiora High School in North
Canterbury, Westlake Girls High School
in Auckland, Macleans College in
Auckland, and Wellington Girls' College
in Wellington have a house named after
her.

New Zealand issued this postage stamp in

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