Katherine Mansfield, pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was a New Zealand-born English master of the short story, who evolved a distinctive prose style with many overtones of poetry. Her delicate stories, focused upon psychological conflicts, have an obliqueness of narration and a subtlety of observation that reveal the influence of Anton Chekhov. She, in turn, had much influence on the development of the short story as a form of literature. She was born in 1888 in Wellington and left New Zealand at the age of 19 to establish herself in England as a writer. Her initial disillusion appears in the ill-humoured stories collected in In a German Pension (1911). Until 1914 she published stories in Rhythm and The Blue Review, edited by the critic and essayist John Middleton Murry, whom she married in 1918 after her divorce from George Bowden. The death of her soldier brother in 1915 shocked her into a recognition that she owed what she termed a sacred debt to him and to the remembered places of her native country. Prelude (1918) was a series of short stories beautifully evocative of her family memories of New Zealand. These, with others, were collected in Bliss (1920), which secured her reputation and is typical of her art. In the next two years Mansfield did her best work, achieving the height of her powers in The Garden Party (1922), which includes the classic “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” a subtle account of genteel frustration. The last five years of her life were shadowed by tuberculosis. She died in 1923 in France. Her final work (apart from unfinished material) was published posthumously in The Dove’s Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924). From her papers, Murry edited the Journal (1954), and he also published with annotations her letters to him (1951). Also were published her collected letters (1984–2008) and Mansfield’s notebooks (1997).
