Katherine mansfield - biography

Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield was born as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888.

She was the daughter of a wealthy colonial family. She lived for six years in the rural village of Karori and then, her family sent her to Queen's College, London for her education.

Back in New Zealand in 1906, she took up music and became an accomplishedvioloncellist, her first love, but her father denied her the opportunity to become a professional cello player.

In 1908 she studied typing and bookkeeping at Wellington Technical College, but, weary of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, she and her lifelong friend Ida Baker persuaded Mansfield's father to allow Katherine to move back to England, with an allowance of £100 a year. She never returnedto New Zealand again.
She quickly fell into the bohemian and bisexual way of life lived by many artists of that era. She began writing short stories and entered London's cultural circles, where she met such contemporaries as D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.
After an unhappy marriage in 1909 to George Brown, whom she left a few days after the wedding, Mansfield toured for a while as an extrain opera. Before the marriage she had an affair with Garnett Trowell, a musician, and became pregnant and her mother had her sent to Bavaria. [2].
She suffered a miscarriage, but the whole sequence of events and experiences gave her the impetus to publish her first collection of Short stories The German Pension (1911).
In that same year she met the Socialist critic and essayist John MiddletonMurray. Their tempestuous relationship together brought Katherine Mansfield into contact with many of leading lights of English literature of that era. Most notably, she came to the attention of D. H. Lawrence. This attention is most obvious in his depiction of Mansfield and Murry as Gudrun and Gerald in Woman in Love (1917).
She also contracted gonorrhoea around this time, an event that was toplague her with arthritic pain for the rest of her short life, as well as to make her view herself as a 'soiled' woman.
Mansfield co-edited and contributed to a series of journals. Until 1914 she published stories in Rhythm and The Blue Review.
During the war she travelled restlessly between England and France. In 1915 she met her brother "Chummie". Her life and work were changed forever with hisdeath during World War I. She was shocked and traumatised by the experience, so much so that her work began to take refuge in the nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand. [3]

Though she continued writing between her first and second collections ("Prelude", 1918), she rarely published her work, and sank into depression. Her health declined further after a near-fatal attack ofpleurisy when she contracted tuberculosis in 1917. It was while combating the disease in health spas across Europe, suffering a serious haemorrhage in 1918, that Mansfield began writing the works she would become best known for. In that year Mansfield divorced her first husband and married John Murray.
"Miss Brill," the bittersweet story of a fragile woman living an ephemeral life of observation andsimple pleasures in Paris, established Mansfield as one of the pre-eminent writers of the Modernist period, upon its publication in 1920's Bliss. The title story from that collection, "Bliss," which involved a similar character facing her husband's infidelity, also found critical acclaim. She followed with the equally praised collection, The Garden Party, published in 1922.
In her last yearsMansfield lived much of her time in southern France and in Switzerland, seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. Without the company of her literary friends, family, or her husband, she wrote much about her own roots and her childhood.
Mansfield died of a pulmonary haemorrhage on January 9, 1923, in Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau, France. Her last words were: "I love...