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Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand on October 14, 1888. After being educated in London, Mansfield briefly returned to New Zealand. Because of its geographic distance from much of the rest of the Western world in the early 20th century, Mansfield felt isolated in New Zealand.  At the age of nineteen, Mansfield relocated to Europe to pursue her career as an author, a move that would prove to be permanent. After becoming pregnant while unmarried, Mansfield’s mother took her to Bavaria to complete her pregnancy, where she later miscarried. The unintended pregnancy and its aftermath caused Mansfield’s mother to disown her, and she spent the rest of her life traveling across Europe. Her brother was killed during a training accident during his service in World War I, and this loss shaped her perspective on the war, eventually inspiring her character and themes in “The Fly.” 

Mansfield contracted tuberculosis in 1917, and she struggled with the disease for five years before she died in 1923 at the young age of 34, cared for by her romantic companion Ida Baker. 

At the beginning of her career, Mansfield published sketches, or short stories describing aspects of life. Her first collection, published in 1911, was titled In a German Pension. She also published many pieces in the magazines Rhythm and The Athenaeum, both of which were edited by the man who would later become her husband, John Middleton Murry. Some of her most well-known works include Bliss and Other Stories, published in 1920, The Garden Party, and Other Stories, published in 1922, and her novel The Aloe, published posthumously in 1930. She published many stories after the death of her brother, in memory of the time they spent together in New Zealand, the most representative of this period being Prelude. Murry went against her express wishes when he edited and published her letters and journals. 

Mansfield’s writing is known for representing complexity through deceptively simple concepts. She is also known for shaping modernism as a movement, alongside contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, D.H Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, and others associated with a group of English writers known as The Bloomsbury Group. Notably, Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield was the only writer of whom she was jealous. Her work was influenced by the works of Anton Chekhov, who also took inspiration from her in return. As a prolific writer of short stories, she moved away from other more structured forms of writing to focus on a single moment or idea to bring out the complexities of the internal lives of characters. She prioritized detail, and her writing reflects her attention to life around her.

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