Katherine Mansfield was an internationally acclaimed New Zealand author who revolutionised 20th-century English short-story writing. She died on January 9 1923.

Katherine Mansfield was the pen-name of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, she was the daughter of successful Wellington businessman Harold Beauchamp and Annie Burnell Dyer. Mansfield was born 14 October 1888 Wellington, New Zealand and grew up in Thorndon, Wellington, in a family of six children. She left to go to London in 1908 and never returned. However she never lost her ties to the country of her childhood, which became the setting for some of her best known stories, which included ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’.

Mansfield wrote, ‘I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened’. She lived by this belief and defied convention in her personal life and in her writing. While living in London she mixed widely with London literary circles. She inspired mixed reactions from other authors of the time; Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of her writing, but the poet T.S. Eliot described her as ‘a thick-skinned toady’ and ‘a dangerous woman’. She had a long friendship with the novelist D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, but after they fell out he called her ‘a loathsome reptile’. She had a long standing relationship with modernist writer John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married. Forming an identity as ‘the two tigers’, the pair set out to challenge the literary establishment. ‘Tig’ and ‘Wig’, as they called each other, had a stormy, on-again off-again relationship for the rest of Mansfield’s life.

In December 1917 Mansfield developed pleurisy and was diagnosed as having a spot on the lung which later developed into tuberculosis, Mansfield however refused to enter a sanatorium. On the evening of 9 January 1923 she suffered a fatal haemorrhage in Fontainebleau, France where she had been living and was buried at Avon-Fontainebleau.

Mansfield’s life and works have inspired biographies, radio and television programs, plays, operatic works and films. Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages.

The Beauchamp family's early home in Thorndon, 75 Tinakori Road, has been restored and is one of New Zealand’s most visited heritage sites.

www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/3m42/mansfield-katherine

Archives New Zealand Reference: ABKH W4437 NF 316

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