Katherine Mansfield

BOOK REPORT TO K.MANSFIELD’S STORIES.

Katherine Mansfield

Short story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is noted for her short stories with themes relating to women's lives and social hierarchies as well as her sense of wit and characterizations.

Katherine Mansfield has played an important role in the genre of the short story. The New Zealand-born writer, who spent much of her adulthood in Europe, "is a central figure in the development of the modern short story," noted Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. "An early practitioner of stream-of-consciousness narration, she applied this technique to create stories based on the illumination of character rather than the contrivances of plot." Mansfield also attempted to free herself from the domination of her bourgeois family and the expectations for women of her class. As a young woman she often heeded her own determined whims, but later settled into a period of stability and literary creativity with her 1918 marriage to a fellow writer, editor, and literary critic. Together they moved in social circles that included some of the most acclaimed English-language writers of the early twentieth century.

Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, to a family of English descent in 1888. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a successful merchant who eventually became one of the English colony's most prominent citizens, rising to the position of chair of the Bank of New Zealand. She once described her mother as "constantly suspicious, constantly overbearingly tyrannous," and from an early age Mansfield seemed resentful toward her middle-class provincial family. As a writer, she later explored the theme of the hierarchy of class distinctions that restricted upbringings such as hers. As a teenager she was sent away to a finishing school in London that was a more intellectually rigorous institution than most girls of her class attended. There she became active in its magazine, for which she wrote several short stories, and established a lifelong friendship with classmate Ida Baker. When her schooling came to an end, Mansfield returned to her family's increasingly prosperous household in Wellington, but was determined to take leave again permanently. Enrolling in secretarial and bookkeeping courses, her parents allowed her to live abroad on her own, and in 1908 she returned to London. There she resided in a hostel for young, unmarried women pursuing artistic careers (she herself was an accomplished cellist) paid for by a stipend she received from her father until her death at age 34.