Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield
Mansfield in 1917
Born	(1888-10-14)14 October 1888 Wellington, New Zealand
Died	9 January 1923(1923-01-09) (aged 34) Fontainebleau, France
Pen name	Katherine Mansfield
Nationality	New Zealand (British subject)
Literary movement	Modernism
Spouse	George Bowden, John Middleton Murry
Partner	Ida Constance Baker
Relatives	Arthur Beauchamp (grandfather) Harold Beauchamp (father) Elizabeth von Arnim (cousin)

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (nee Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917 she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.

Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker and she was a cousin of the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had two older sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother, born in 1894. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, became the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted. Her grandfather was Arthur Beauchamp, who briefly represented the Picton electorate in Parliament. In 1893 the Mansfield family moved from Thorndon to Karori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood. She used some of her memories of this time as an inspiration for the "Prelude" story.

Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington proper in 1898), in 1898 and 1899. In 1902 she became enamoured of a cellist, Arnold Trowell, although the feelings were largely unreciprocated. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father.