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 Katherine Mansfield [Mansfield’s
Poems]
1888–1923
poet
Mansfield, Katherine is at best a qualified national
icon in New Zealand. As an expatriate writing in the London
literary world and reflecting European movements of thought she had little
connection with early New Zealand
writing, which accorded her little recognition. In Europe,
Francis Carco, John Middleton Murry and Aldous Huxley put versions of her
into novels, and other accounts were published by A.R. Orage, Olgivanna,
Beatrice Hastings and others.
Katherine was born in Wellington
as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, into a family with vigorous social
ambitions. Her mother was the delicate and aloof Annie Dyer; her father,
Harold Beauchamp, a canny and successful businessman. A first cousin in Sydney
became the best-selling novelist, and Mansfield’s
first role model, Elizabeth von Arnim.
After studying at Queen’s College in London,
where she also immersed herself in French, German and music, Kathleen
Beauchamp returned to Wellington,
rebellious and unsettled, in late 1906. Although her life was comfortable and
socially expansive, for the next twenty months she warred against parental
vigilance, and found Wellington understandably
provincial. She filled what she later called ‘great complaining notebooks’,
published her first work under noms de plume in The Lone Hand and The Native
Companion in Australia, and moved through a number of furtive infatuations
with men and women. She also made an extended caravan journey into remote
Urewera country in the middle of the North Island, her one experience of
‘roughing it’, returning home with a liking for Maori and English tourists,
‘but nothing in between’.
She first fell in love with Garnet Trowell, a young
violinist whose father had taught her the cello in Wellington.
When the affair collapsed some months later, she impulsively married G.C.
Bowden, a singing teacher whose name she officially bore for the next nine
years, but whom she left the day after the marriage. She returned to Garnet,
travelled with his opera company, became pregnant, and again separated.
During those months she depended, as she was to do for the rest of her life,
on her close but exasperating friendship with Ida Baker, her Rhodesian school
chum from Queen’s College
Over the years, as she traveled extensively between London
and Germany,
she grew closer to Lady Ottoline Morrell and, more cautiously, to Virginia
Woolf. For a time Maynard Keynes was
her landlord, Lytton Strachey was attracted to her because she was like a
Japanese doll, Bertrand Russell admired her mind and attempted an affair,
while T.S. Eliot warned Ezra Pound she was ‘a dangerous woman’. But
Mansfield’s wary colonial elusiveness allowed more relaxed friendships with
artists and the mildly eccentric – for a time, with the East End painter Mark
Gertler, and the androgynous Carrington; more enduringly, from 1912 onwards
with the Scottish painter J.D. Fergusson, and the American Anne Estelle Rice,
whose portrait of her is in the National Museum in Wellington; and
increasingly with the deaf aristocrat, Dorothy Brett, who also painted. But
it was illness, rather than choice, that led to her gradual separation from
most of her friends in England.
From early 1918, when her tuberculosis became a matter
of serious concern, Mansfield
moved constantly between London
and the Riviera. Even after her
marriage to John Middleton Murry, a precociously gifted, lower-middle-class
man from Oxford, she remained
dependent on Ida Baker as companion and quasi-nurse, while Murry was
committed to his war work in MI5, then later to his journalism.
Katherine died at Fontainebleau
on January 9, 1923, a few
weeks before the publication of “The Garden Party and Other Stories,” which
confirmed her place among the Modernists of her generation.
Source:
www2.vuw.ac.nz/nzbookcouncil/writers/mansfieldk.htm
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