John Middleton Murry’ whose legacy was initially defined by her highly edited posthumous outpouring was not quite the same person as the Katherine Mansfield who had lived, loved and written so briefly and intensely. She was in fact an extraordinarily conflicted and complicated woman, a restless soul, critical of others as much as herself, a free spirit born in the wrong era – and the ‘wife’ of a good many more people than John Middleton Murry.
Restless Wonder
Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield was the middle daughter of five born to Annie and Sir Harold Beauchamp, a successful banker; the couple eventually had a much-longed-for son. The Beauchamp parents were descended from British immigrants and retained an affinity with England that was transferred to Katherine. When the family moved to London in 1903, Katherine’s creative side was brought to life. Although she was already a talented cellist and an amateur writer showing ‘promise of great merit’, albeit ‘surly’ and ‘imaginative to the point of untruth’, in England she discovered a rich literary heritage that she yearned to become a part of. She composed a number of stories for her school’s newspaper, of which she later became the editor.
By the time the Beauchamps returned to New Zealand in 1906, Katherine was convinced that ‘the days full of perpetual Society functions’ that her father’s position demanded were unequivocally not for her. It was a ‘waste of life’ – something she would continue to find deplorable to her dying day. She considered her parents ‘quite unbearable’, as well as ‘so absolutely my mental inferiors’. ‘What is going to happen in the future?’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I am full of restless wonder.’ Mansfield longed to be elsewhere doing more exciting things – and in 1908, having secured an annual allowance of £100 from her father, she sailed for London and did just that.
Living Dangerously
Katherine Mansfield arrived in London as a nineteen-year-old on the lookout for life. Even by modern standards, she threw herself into this pursuit as if she were out for revenge. She later looked back on this period as one in which she became ‘an ardent disciple of the doctrine of living dangerously’. Within eight months she had resumed a friendship with Arnold Trowell, a fellow cellist from Wellington with whom she had previously thought herself in love; become pregnant by his twin brother, Garnet; hastily married George Bowden, an older music teacher whom she barely knew; and abandoned him on the night of their wedding.
Of greatest concern to her mother back in New Zealand, however, was Mansfield’s intense friendship with Ida Baker, a South African girl she had met during the family’s three-year stint in London. Deducing – not without cause – that Katherine’s apparent breakdown was the result of a romantic relationship with Baker, Mrs Beauchamp packed her daughter off to a Bavarian spa resort, returned to Wellington and promptly deleted her from her will. Katherine suffered a miscarriage during her expulsion to Germany.
But, as so often in her short life, Mansfield would not be beaten down or told what to do. Returning to London in 1910, she struck up a series of relationships with both men and women, including Ida Baker, and embarked on a period of prolific short-story writing. She even found inspiration in her hellish Bavarian exile, writing satirical sketches of German life that became her first published collection, In a German Pension (1911). She wrote articles for a socialist magazine, The New Age, and also submitted stories including the Maori-inspired ‘How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped’ to a new arts magazine called Rhythm, whose editor was John Middleton Murry.
Rhythm was not to last, but Mansfield’s connection with Murry was permanent. They had an on-off relationship until 1918, and then an on-off marriage that lasted until her death. Ida Baker likewise remained a fixture until the end.
Real Life
Mansfield’s output during and after the First World War was abundant, and fuelled in large part by two terrible tragedies: the first was the death on the battlefields of France of her beloved brother, Leslie, in 1915; the second was the news, in late 1917, that she had tuberculosis, a condition from which she never recovered. The war itself seemed to stifle her – ‘I have simply felt it closing in on me … and all to no purpose’ – and its effects caused her to reconsider the youthful exuberance of her earlier work. One of her last stories, ‘The Fly’, deals with grief in the wake of the First World War, and the ultimate futility of the struggle to survive.
In 1918, Mansfield’s story ‘Prelude’ was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. (The Murrys had become friendly with the Woolfs, among other literary luminaries on the London scene, including D. H. Lawrence and his wife.) The story was a revised version of one she had begun writing in the wake of her brother’s death – a story she felt she owed it to him to write – and is about a New Zealand family and the intricacies and complications of their lives, loves and secrets. She later continued their story in ‘At the Bay’, as well as exploring similar settings and family dynamics in other stories including ‘The Garden Party’.
As in so much of Mansfield’s fiction, her characters’ inner emotional lives are richer and more intuitively described than their outer actions; there tends to be less ‘plot’ in her stories than there is longing, and agonising, and finding that reality rarely matches expectation. It was a natural theme to pursue for Mansfield, for whom the grass was repeatedly greener on the other side. The tedium of reality forever intruded on her fantasies – in the middle of the First World War she had even temporarily abandoned Murry and Baker to track down another lover, writer Francis Carco, who was serving on the treacherous Western Front in France.
‘I Am Simply Unworthy’
Mansfield never forgot that she was an outsider: in New Zealand she was pained by the exploitation of the indigenous Maori by wealthy white interlopers such as herself; in England she was ‘a little savage from New Zealand’; as a lover of both men and women she was at odds with the moral code of her era. It was perhaps because of this that she had elements of the fantasist about her, always imagining life to be more full of possibility than it really proved to be – a trait evident in her most memorable, most disillusioned, characters.
She was a true life-liver at a time when it wasn’t strictly acceptable to be one; a writer whose villains are cold and self-regarding but who consistently sought to suit herself. And she knew she was not perfect: writing to Ida Baker just ten months before dying of a haemorrhage related to her tuberculosis, she admitted, ‘I am simply unworthy of friendship … I take advantage of you, demand perfection of you, crush you. And the devil of it is that even though that is true as I write it I want to laugh.’
Mansfield published just three collections of stories in her lifetime, and although they made her popular she knew she was seriously unwell; she once confessed to a friend: ‘I shall not be “fashionable” long.’ She was planning her next collection of stories when she died in France in early 1923, but she left behind instructions to Murry to ‘tear up and burn as much as possible’ – an instruction he ignored, for better or worse. In truth she had been horrified at the idea of dying without publishing everything she’d hoped to (‘How unbearable it would be to die – leave “scraps”, “bits”’), and it is thanks to Murry that much of her writing ever came to light, even if his version of her was highly edited. But of all the posthumous tributes she received, perhaps none was more telling of her talent than that from Virginia Woolf, her friend, critic and publisher, who admitted: ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’
HOW PEARL BUTTON WAS KIDNAPPED
Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little