The directory «Plots»

Mansfield Katherine
(1888—1923)

Short-story writer and poet, Katherine Mansfield, a pseudonym for Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (from 1910), was born on October 14, 1888, in Wellington, New Zealand. She was educated in the cello at Queen's College, London, 1903-1906, after which she returned to study music in New Zealand 1907-08. She came back to London in 1908, married George Bowden (a musician), March 2, 1909, separated from him the same day, and afterwards gave birth in Bavaria to a stillborn baby by Garnet Trowell, another musician. This led to her first volume of fiction, In a German Pension (1909). Her life was a train of hardships. Suffering from gonorrhea, she was unable to have children afterwards. Being bisexual, she had a long-term liaison with Ida Baker, but after meeting John Middleton Murry in 1911, they lived together until she divorced Bowden and married Murry on May 3, 1918. Mansfield lost Lesley Heron Beauchamp, her brother, to a wartime accident in 1915. This death led to some of her greatest stories. With Murry, she co-founded a short-lived magazine, Signature, with D. H. Lawrence in 1916. Suffering from tuberculosis, she entered George Gurdieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man near Fontainebleau and died from the disease in January 9, 1923.

New Zealand, 1989, Katherine Mansfield