Katherine Mansfield

Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp on October 14, 1888, in Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand, the daughter of Harold Beauchamp, a businessman who rose to chair the Bank of New Zealand and was later knighted, and Annie Burnell Dyer, she spent the happiest years of her childhood after the family moved out to the village of Karori in 1893, the place her fiction would return to again and again. Her first story appeared in a New Zealand society magazine when she was still a girl, and in 1903 she sailed with her sisters to London to attend Queen's College, where she edited the college paper, kept up the cello, read the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, and met Ida Baker, who stayed devoted to her for the rest of her life. Back in Wellington after school, she left again two years later, in 1908, and after a failed marriage and a lonely stay in Bavaria, where she first read Chekhov, she published In a German Pension in 1911, a collection she later called immature. That year she began a relationship with John Middleton Murry, editor of the little magazine Rhythm, whom she married in 1918. The death of her younger brother Leslie in October 1915, killed in a grenade drill in the Ypres Salient, turned her back towards their shared childhood, and out of that grief came Prelude, published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1918. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in December 1917, she spent her last years moving between France, Italy and Switzerland in search of a cure, and in those years wrote the stories that made her name, collected in Bliss (1920) and The Garden Party (1922). Her birthplace on Tinakori Road is now a museum, and a fellowship still sends a New Zealand writer to work at her former home in Menton. She died on January 9, 1923, at Fontainebleau, France, at the age of thirty-four.

On 2 March 1909, in London, she married George Bowden, a singing teacher eleven years older than her, and left him the same evening, before the marriage was consummated. She was pregnant by another man, Garnet Trowell. Her mother came to London, blamed Ida Baker, took her to a Bavarian spa town, and cut her out of her will.