Truth seeking

The brilliant light and terrible shadow of Katherine Mansfield's life is related afresh in a new biography.

- BY CK STEAD

Many serious readers in New Zealand are likely to know the broad outlines of Katherine Mansfield's sad and colourful life: the hugely talented daughter (born 1888) of a Wellington banker and merchant, who is sent in her teens with her two sisters to be schooled in London, where she discovers the literary avant garde of the time. After almost three years, she returns to the colony she now finds intolerably boring and pesters her parents to let her return to Europe, which reluctantly they do. In the decades that follow, she has considerable success as a “modernist” writer, is credited with having made something new of the short story form in English, moves in the most distinguished literary circle of the early 20th century, and dies of tuberculosis aged 34.

As a consequence, and because so many of her best stories draw on her life in New Zealand, Mansfield remains something of an icon for those interested in our literature, a mixed blessing some would say, an irrelevance others would say, but difficult to ignore, if only in the form of a statue on Lampton Quay. There is, of course, no need to know about her life; it is the stories, together with her incomparable letters and journals, that are her legacy. But the life contains so much social history it does deserve our attention; and Gerri Kimber's new biography has some surprises for us.