Discuss the life and works of Katherine Mansfield.

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LIFE AND WORKS

Katherine Mansfield is greatest essayist of his time. He wrote many essays and stories. He is the pseudonym of Kathrine Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-1923), writer of short stories. She was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She was sent to London in 1903 to complete her education at Queen’s College. After returning to New Zealand, she began to read extensively and began to write. Her Vignettes’ were published in the Australian monthly Native companion in 1907. In 1908 she returned to London to pursue a literary career. She married George Bowden in 1909, but left her husband after a few days. She became pregnant by another man and gave birth to a still born child serving as a background to her collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911), most of them published in A. R. Orage’s New Age.

In 1911 she began to publish in Rhythm, an ‘avantgarde’ quarterly founded by Murry and Michael Sadlier. Mansfield’s health was poor and like D. H. Lawrence, who lived in Cornwall, near she and Murry, she discovered that she was suffering from tuberculosis, Despite intervals of recovery in the south of France, her health continued to deteriorate. She and Murry were married in 1918, but in 1923 she died at Fontainebleau.

She is generally acknowledged as one of the finest writers of her period. Critics have praised her penetrating and relentless intelligence balanced by a delicate sense of form – qualities which are assets to a writer of short story. After In a German Pension, Prelude was published which centered round her childhood memories in New Zealand, showing the influence of Chekhov. Other appeared in Bliss and other stories (1919), The Garden Party and other Stories (1920) and Other Stories (1922), being the last work published during her lifetime. Posthumous works included Poems (1923), Some thing Childish and Other Stories (1924) and a Fairy Stories (1932). The collected stories of Kathrine Mansfield (1945) was an omnibus volume. Murry edited The Letters of Kathrine Mansfield (1928) and Kathrine Mansfield’s Letters to John Middleton Murry 1913-1922 published in 1951. Her works will be remembered always.