Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen (Katherine) Mansfield Beauchamp, the daughter of Harold Beauchamp (1858–1938) and Anne Burnell Dyer (1864–1918), was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 14th October 1888. Her father was a very successful businessman and in 1893 he bought a country house at Karori, where Mansfield attended primary school. She then moved onto Wellington High School where she began writing stories.
In 1903 Beauchamp took his three elder daughters to educated at Queen's College, the school founded by Frederick Denison Maurice. Encouraged by her teachers, Mansfield began reading the work of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Leo Tolstoy. She also edited the college magazine.
Katherine Mansfield reluctantly went home to New Zealand. She continued to write and had some stories published in The Native Companion. She also had a love affair with a young woman artist, Edith Bendall. On 1st June, 1907, she wrote in her journal: "Last night I spent in her arms - and tonight I hate her - which being interpreted, means that I adore her; that I cannot lie in my bed and not feel the magic of her body. I feel more powerfully all those so-termed sexual impulses with her than I have with any man. She enthrals, enslaves me - and her personal self - her body absolute - is my worship." She later wrote about a lesbian relationship in the short story Leves Amores.
Her relationship with Bendall upset her parents and in July 1908 they agreed that she could go and live in England. At first she rented a room in a hostel for young women in Warwick Crescent, Paddington. Soon afterwards Mansfield became involved with a young musician Garnet Trowell. She became pregnant by him, but soon parted from him, and married George Bowden (1877–1975), on 2nd March 1909. Soon afterwards she left her husband to live with Ida Baker. According to her biographer, Claire Tomalin: "Hearing of the marriage, Mrs Beauchamp crossed the world to investigate, warning Ida's family about lesbianism and taking Kathleen straight off to a Bavarian spa, Bad Wörishofen. Here she abandoned Kathleen and returned to Wellington, where she disinherited her. Her father, however, continued to pay her allowance, and over the years increased it to £300 per annum."
Primary Sources
Late Tuesday evening I bicycled over to Garsington to see Dorothy Brett about this house business, & Katherine Mansfield was there. I shared a room with her. So talked to her more than anyone else late at night in bed & early in the morning. I like her very much. It is a good thought to think upon that I shall live with them & Brett... What parties we shall have in Gower Street in the evenings. Katherine was full of plans. She was splendid at a concert there was at Garsington and sang coon songs, & acted a play. It was a curious night all very strange. I am out of favour now! Completely! I do not know why - But her ladyship loves and fondles me no more! and Brett was rather severe. I got rather lonely & depressed there.
Except for Katherine I should not have enjoyed it much. But she surprised me I did not believe she would love the sort of things I do so much. Pretending to be other people & playing games & all those strange people with their intrigues... Katherine and I wore trousers. It was wonderful being alone in the garden.
Hearing the music inside, & lighted windows and feeling like two young boys - very eager. The moon shining on the pond, fermenting & covered with warm slime.
How I hate being a girl. I must tell you for I have felt it so much lately. More than usual. And that night I forgot for almost half an hour in the garden, and felt other pleasures strange, & so exciting, a feeling of all the world being below me to choose from. Not tied - with female encumbrances, & hanging flesh.
John Middleton Murry published every scrap he could find, and her tigerish desire for privacy was sacrificed to please a public avid to sift through her secrets. But who can blame him? She was a genius, of the kind who provokes both worthy and unworthy curiosity, both the prurient wish to hear of the ill health and sexual practices of the mighty, and the abiding and educative human craving to try to enter into the minds of those we admire, to become them for a space (and I suspect the two kinds of curiosity are inextricably blended). What fury fills us when we think of the pious executors and grandchildren who burn letters and memoirs to protect the good name of the dead...
Early in their friendship, which started at Queen's College, Harley Street, in 1903, Ida Baker dedicated herself to the service of Katherine, perceiving, although there was never much intellectual rapport, that she was an exceptional person and soon realizing that she needed the sort of help that could come only from a friend who put no value on her own affairs or time. Throughout Katherine's life Ida Baker came when she was summoned and disappeared again (sometimes reluctantly) when dismissed, gave up her jobs, took on domestic work that was totally uncongenial and endured scoldings and ridicule. She was mocked to her face and cruelly dealt with in letters, the journal and even stories. Why did she endure it?
Obviously she loved Katherine passionately, and the relationship was more complex than a simple served and serving one; Katherine felt that Ida was too emotionally dependent on her, hence the "incubus" accusation; but she was dependent too, and could be jealous: "I only love you when you're blind to everybody but us." To say that it was a lesbian attachment does not explain much; Ida points out that Katherine's first husband considered that this was the cause of the break-up of the marriage, and mentions that she did not even know what lesbianism was at that time. Katherine's mother thought the friendship "unwise" too, in a euphemism familiar to anyone who has been at a girls' school; in fact Katherine was pregnant by another man when she married. Katherine herself certainly knew what lesbianism was, as her journal makes clear, and was capable of flirting with either sex, but she was never in love with Ida in the way she was with Murry or Francis Carco; only she enjoyed her power of attracting and enslaving, and then felt guilty and irritated by the humble, fussy adoration.
