Katherine
Mansfield Beauchamp, the daughter of the successful businessman, Harold
Beauchamp, was born in Wellington, New
Zealand, in 1888.
Educated at Queen's College, London (1903-1906) she married George
Bowden in 1908. The relationship was unsuccessful and Mansfield moved
to Bavaria where she gave birth to a stillborn child. After
the success of Mansfield's first collection of stories, In
the German Pension (1911), she returned to London
and wrote regularly for the periodical, The
New Age.
In 1912 Mansfield began living with the critic, John
Middleton Murry. Mansfield was now introduced to other important
figures in the literary world such as D.
H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Ottoline
Morrell, Leonard Woolf and Virginia
Woolf. The death of her brother, Leslie
Beauchamp, in 1915, while serving with the army in the First
World War, had a profound influence on her writing. This is reflected
in her first major work, Prelude
(1917).
Diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis,
Mansfield moved to the south of France. Mansfield continued to write
and two collections of short stories were published: Bliss
and Other Stories (1920) and The
Garden Party and Other Stories (1922).
Katherine
Mansfield
died in Fontainbleau in
1923. After her death two further collections of short stories were
published: The Dove's Nest
(1923) and Something Childish
(1924). John Middleton Murry edited and arranged
for the publication of her Journals
(1927) and The Letters of Katherine Mansfield
(1928).
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