Katherine Mansfield, born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, left her native New Zealand for London when she was nineteen and lived in Europe for most of her life until she died in 1923, at 34, from tuberculosis.
Her early exposure to the Maori led her to write sympathetically of them in her later years. Stories like "Prelude" and "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" observe the repressive nature of colonialism.
Mansfield lived as a bohemian and was influenced...
Katherine Mansfield, born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, left her native New Zealand for London when she was nineteen and lived in Europe for most of her life until she died in 1923, at 34, from tuberculosis.
Her early exposure to the Maori led her to write sympathetically of them in her later years. Stories like "Prelude" and "How Pearl Button was Kidnapped" observe the repressive nature of colonialism.
Mansfield lived as a bohemian and was influenced by artistic movements like Fauvism, with its emphasis on individual expression, and the literary movement of Modernism, which rejected traditional structural aspects of stories like expositions and conclusions and sought to capture the disillusionment of life after WWI.
One of her most famous stories, "The Garden Party," revisits and refines themes found in her earlier works, especially the divisions of social class along both racial and economic lines. Despite a comfortable upbringing, Mansfield was sensitive to people whose circumstances were reduced through no fault of their own.
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