Petri Liukkonen
[1] New Zealand’s most famous writer, who was closely associated with D.H.Lawrence and something of a rival of Virginia Woolf.Mansfield’s creative years were burdened with loneliness, illness, jealousy, alienation - all this reflected in her work with the bitter depiction of marital and family relationships of her middle-class characters.Her short stories are also notable for their use of stream of consciousness.Like the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, Mansfield depicted trivial events and subtle changes in human behavior.
[2] “Henry was a great fellow for books.He did not read many nor did he possess above half a dozen.He looked at all in the Charing Cross Road during lunch-time and at any odd time in London; the quantity with which he was on nodding terms was amazing.By his clean neat handling of them and by his nice choice of phrase when discussing them with one or another bookseller you would have thought that he had taken his pap with a tome propped before his nurse’s bosom.But you would have been wrong.” (from Something Childish But Very Natural )
[3] Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, into a middle-class colonial family.Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a banker and her mother, Annie Burnell Dyer, was of genteel origins.She lived for six years in the rural village of Karori.Later on Mansfield said, “I imagine I was always writing.Twaddle it was, too.But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” At the age of nine she had her first story published.Entitled Enna Blake it appeared in The High School Reporter in Wellington, with the editor’s comment, that it “shows promise of great merit”.
[4] As a first step to her rebellion against her background, she withdrew to London in 1903 and studied at Queen’s College, where she joined the staff of the College Magazine.Back in New Zealand in 1906, she then took up music, and had affairs with both men and women.Her father denied her the opportunity to become a professional cello player —she was an accomplished violoncellist.In 1908 she studied typing and bookkeeping at Wellington Technical College.Her lifelong friend Ida Baker (L.M., Leslie Moore in her diary and correspondence) persuaded Mansfield’s father to allow Katherine to move back to England, with an allowance of ￡100 a year.There she devoted herself to writing.Mansfield never visited New Zealand again.