Katherine Mansfield - great author and social rebel

Katherine Mansfield lived more in her thirty-four years on earth than most people can manage in 'three score years and ten'. When she died, she was recognised as one of the most important short story writers of her time in the English-speaking world. But, along the way, she also travelled over much of central Europe, married twice, had many intimate relationships with both men and women and was befriended by some of the greatest authors of her day.

She has always been considered the best writer that New Zealand has produced, although she never made much money from her work when she was alive and lived on an allowance sent by her father.

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born into a privileged upper-middle class family. Her father later became the Governor of the Bank of New Zealand and her grandfather had been a member of the New Zealand Parliament. When she was only ten years old, she started writing short stories and managed to get these published in her school newspaper. Katherine seemed to have all the ingredients for a brilliant future: money, social status, good looks and talent.

Yet, even as a child, she lived her life according to her own rules. When she had only just entered her teenage years, she fell in love with a young man called Arnold Trowell, who, unfortunately, did not share her feelings. The following year, 1903, she followed her sisters to study in England but returned home in 1906, when she had completed her schooling. She quickly realised that the quiet, provincial life of New Zealand did not offer her what she needed to become a professional writer – she was bored there – and, in 1908, returned to Europe.

That same year, she had affairs with two women, noting in her diary that she knew it was wrong but she was determined to follow her heart. The problem was that her heart seemed to lead her in so many different directions. By the following year, she was pregnant by Arnold Trowell's younger brother, Garnet. She had wanted to start a relationship with Arnold himself (who was also then living in London), but he was already in love with another woman and, so, she had to make do with Garnet.

She was not yet twenty-one years old and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Garnet's parents were not very happy about welcoming her into the family. After all, Katherine had already been madly in love with one brother, had sex with the other before they were married and had a couple of lesbian lovers in her recent past. Instead, she married a singing teacher, but left him the same day as their wedding, before they had even been to bed together. She once wrote in her diary:

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."

It was this philosophy that alarmed Katherine's parents. Her mother, probably very concerned about her daughter's pregnancy and her marriage of only a few hours, rushed to England and took her daughter immediately to Germany, where she could have the child in secrecy. She blamed Katherine's failed marriage on her lesbian friends and wanted to break the connections between them. However, things did not work out as she had planned.

In the first place, the pregnant Katherine found a new lesbian lover in Germany and then, within weeks, became involved with a male Polish translator, who blackmailed her for the return of her letters. (We do not know what she wrote that meant she had to pay to get them back because she quickly destroyed them.) Katherine's mother realised that she had as little control over her daughter with her in Germany as she had from thousands of miles away in New Zealand and returned home. When she arrived, she cut her daughter out of her will. Tragically, Katherine had a miscarriage in Germany and could never have another baby afterwards.

However, it was in Germany that Katherine first read the Russian dramatist and short story writer, Anton Chekhov, whom she greatly admired. She also found the time and concentration to put together some short stories of her own, which she had published in the volume 'In a German Pension'. Sales were disappointing though and the book was not even much mentioned in the newspapers.

Although Katherine was discouraged by the failure of her first book, she continued to write when she returned to England and sent a story to the editor of a literary newspaper, John Middleton Murry, who refused it but asked for a 'darker' one. Katherine not only wrote 'The Woman at the Store' for him, but also persuaded him to start an affair with her, although he was already sleeping with a friend of hers. Her relationship with Middleton Murry was to continue until Katherine's death, although it was a very stormy one.

Middleton Murry had a very different background to Katherine's privileged one. His working class father often used to beat him and was a man without any humour or happiness in him. But he did recognise his son's great intelligence – John could read financial newspapers at three years of age – and took on evening work in order to pay for the boy to attend good schools and later Oxford University. Still, John felt unloved and was desperate to get away from home. He was successful at Oxford both in his studies and with women, who found his vulnerability very attractive and seemed to want to rescue him from his past.

John married Katherine in 1918, after they had been involved for seven years. They had not enjoyed a conventional relationship and Katherine had lovers of both sexes while she was with him. For instance, when they visited the great English author, D. H. Lawrence and his German wife, Frieda, John and Katherine each had sex with both of them. This complicated relationship later caused Lawrence, a writer who was criticised for the explicitness of his novels, to write to Katherine, equally explicitly:

"You are a loathsome reptile; I hope you will die."

In fact, John and Katherine separated after only two weeks of marriage, even though they had known each other for so long. They got on better by letter and Katherine wrote more stories when she was away from him. But, she could not do without him. They seemed to need each other intellectually and emotionally. Katherine's much loved brother 'Chummie' Beauchamp had died during the First World War and she missed him terribly. She also developed tuberculosis and began to become very ill.

Despite everything that was going on in her life – her on-off relationship with Middleton Murry, the death of her brother and her own illness – Katherine continued to write better and better work. She tried hard to separate herself from her characters (although the ideas for many of her stories came from her own life) and produced some of the finest stories in English in the last few years of her life: 'The Garden Party', 'The Fly' and 'Sixpence', among many others. Her work often focuses on flawed relationships, unhappy marriages and the division between the rich and the poor.

Katherine Mansfield died in January 1923 at a clinic in Fontainebleau, outside Paris. She was trying to show Middleton Murry how much better she was after medical treatment and ran up the stairs. Her lungs haemorrhaged and she died almost at once.

John Middleton Murry was heart-broken – so upset, in fact, that he forgot to pay for Katherine's grave and her body was removed to one for people who can't afford their own. He is often criticised by reviewers and biographers, as Katherine criticised him in some of her stories, for the destructiveness of his relationship with her. However, it is sure that he loved her more than anything else in his life.

Soon after Katherine's death, he married a French woman who looks from photographs almost identical to Katherine; he named his children after the ones that he and Katherine used to imagine but could not have themselves. And he spent much of the rest of his life editing and publishing Katherine's work – even when it was very critical of him as her husband and lover. Without this work, we would not have so much of what Katherine wrote, felt and thought.