Katherine Mansfield

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KM 's life was short and much of her writing experimental or oriented towards earning. Though contemporary reviewers sometimes condescended to her youth, gender, and magazine publication, she is now seen as one of our great modernists, her innovations so familiar as to be unnoticeable.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, No. 7, pp. 25 - 6.
25
As well as one of the most interesting and original short-story writers of the Modernist movement, she was a significant letter-writer and diarist. Her poetry, too, is of interest. Claire Tomalin remarked that her diary in particular has made her a cult figure for young women.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Black and white photograph of Katherine Mansfield, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a knitted cardigan with a V-neck and a broad collar, over a light shirt. She has chin-length dark hair and bangs.
Black-and-white portrait photo of Katherine Mansfield. She is pictures in profile.

Milestones

14 October 1888
Kathleen Beauchamp (later KM ) was born in Wellington, New Zealand.
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
400
Boddy, Gillian. Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. Penguin Books Australia, 1988.
1
1897
At eight or nine Kathleen Beauchamp (later KM ) won the school composition prize for an essay entitled A Sea Voyage.
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
14, 400
Crone, Nora. A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield. Arthur H. Stockwell, 1985.
17
7 July 1922
KM wrote The Canary, the last story she ever finished, as a gift for Brett .
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
418
9 January 1923
KM died at Fontainebleau of a massive tubercular haemorrhage after running upstairs. She was thirty-four.
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
418, 383

Biography

Katherine Mansfield was originally a pseudonym used solely for writing, but by July 1910 it was also in daily use. KM had a passion for renaming and recreating herself. Antony Alpers, her biographer, cites a number of names she used, including Catherine, Kass, Kassie, Katie, Katharina, Katherine, Kathie Schönfeld, and Mrs Kathleen Beauchamp Bowden. In another biographical study, Gillian Boddy adds Elizabeth Stanley to the list and suggests, on the authority of a friend of KM 's, that she used more than twenty names and pseudonyms, and constructed distinct personalities for each of them.
Alpers, Antony. The Life of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford University Press, 1982.
404-5, 136, 117-8, 19, 119, 116, 74, 382, 83
Boddy, Gillian. Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer. Penguin Books Australia, 1988.
72, 104

Birth and Family

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