Katherine Mansfield   (1888-1923) LINKS Katherine Mansfield Web Page http://www.buffnet.net/~starmist/kmansfld/kmansfld.htm This page includes biographical information, a chronology of Mansfield's life, and photographs. Deep South Reading Katherine Mansfield as 'Selective Cultural Archaeology' http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol3no2/alice.html Literary E-zine from the University of Otago, New Zealand, features this scholarly article by Alice Hennessy. BIOGRAPHY Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand. In 1903 she persuaded her father, a banker and industrialist, to send her to London to study the cello. After a brief return to New Zealand, she went back to London with a small allowance from her family, deciding to become a writer instead of a musician after meeting D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Mansfield's first book of short stories, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. In the same year she met the literary critic John Middleton Murry, who became her husband in 1918. Bliss and Other Stories (1920) established her reputation and was followed by The Garden-Party (1922). Mansfield took Anton Chekov as her model, but after she was stricken with tuberculosis in 1918 she found it difficult to work. In her posthumously published Journal (1927), she often upbraided herself when she felt too ill to write. Finally she sought a cure for illness at the Gurdjieff Institute in France, run by the noted Armenian mystic Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, whose methods combined spiritual and physical healing. She died at the institute a few months after her thirty-fourth birthday.

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