Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer and critic who was an important figure in the modernist movement.

[1] Born and raised in a house on Tinakori Road in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon, Mansfield was the third child in the Beauchamp family.

The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends with Maata Mahupuku, who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship.

When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group.

Her extended family included the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, and her great-granduncle was a Victorian artist Charles Robert Leslie.

[4][3][5] In 1893, for health reasons, the Beauchamp family moved from Thorndon to the country suburb of Karori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood.

Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed she would take up professionally,[8] but she began contributing to the college newspaper with such dedication that she eventually became its editor.

Her first same-sex romantic relationship was with Maata Mahupuku (sometimes known as Martha Grace), a wealthy young Māori woman whom she had first met at Miss Swainson's school in Wellington and again in London in 1906.

[17] Charles Granville (sometimes known as Stephen Swift), the publisher of Rhythm, absconded to Europe in October 1912 and left Murry responsible for the debts the magazine had accumulated.

In October 1915, he was killed during a grenade training drill while serving with the British Expeditionary Force in the Ypres Salient, Belgium, aged 21.

[20] In a poem describing a dream she had shortly after his death, she wrote: By the remembered stream my brother standsWaiting for me with berries in his hands..."These are my body.

[13] Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing after 1916, which began with several stories, including "Mr Reginald Peacock's Day" and "A Dill Pickle", being published in The New Age.

Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, who had recently set up the Hogarth Press, approached her for a story, and Mansfield presented to them "Prelude", which she had begun writing in 1915 as "The Aloe".

[22] For part of spring and summer 1918, she joined her friend Anne Estelle Rice, an American painter, at Looe in Cornwall with the hope of recovering.

[23] Rejecting the idea of staying in a sanatorium on the grounds that it would cut her off from writing,[6] she moved abroad to avoid the English winter.

[8] She stayed at a half-deserted, cold hotel in Bandol, France, where she became depressed but continued to produce stories, including "Je ne parle pas français".

[8] They came together again, however, and in March 1919 Murry became editor of The Athenaeum, a magazine for which Mansfield wrote more than 100 book reviews (collected posthumously as Novels and Novelists).

[8] Although her relationship with Murry became increasingly distant after 1918[8] and the two often lived apart,[16] this intervention of his spurred her, and she wrote "The Man Without a Temperament", the story of an ill wife and her long-suffering husband.

In May 1921, Mansfield, accompanied by her friend Ida Baker, travelled to Switzerland to investigate the tuberculosis treatment of the Swiss bacteriologist Henri Spahlinge.

[26][8] At Fontainebleau, Mansfield lived at G. I. Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where she was put under the care of Olgivanna Lazovitch Hinzenburg (who later married Frank Lloyd Wright).

[30] Because Murry forgot to pay for her funeral expenses, she initially was buried in a pauper's grave; when matters were rectified, her casket was moved to its current resting place.

[32] An award, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship is offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at her former home, the Villa Isola Bella.

In 2011, a television biopic titled Bliss was made of her early beginnings as a writer in New Zealand; in this, she was played by Kate Elliott.

[8] Mansfield's literary and personal papers and belongings at the Alexander Turnbull Library were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register in 2015.

[35] J. M. Murry wrote in Reminiscences of D.H. Lawrence (1933): "I have been told, by one who should know, that the character of Gudrun in Women in Love was intended for a portrait of Katherine [Mansfield].

[43] The character Kathleen in Evelyn Schlag's 1987 novel Die Kränkung (published in English as Quotations of a Body) is based on Mansfield.

[46] Andrew Crumey's 2023 novel Beethoven's Assassins has a chapter featuring Mansfield and A. R. Orage at George Gurdjieff's institute in France.