Katherine Mansfield

KATHERINE MANSFIELD (1888-1923), the daughter of a banker, was brought up in New Zealand; from the age of 14 to 17 she was a boarder at Queen's College, Harley Street. After a few months at home, she returned to London in 1908, soon becoming part of a progressive and liberated literary and artistic set, and started to write poems and short stories. Her personal life was difficult and eventful, involving an affair and pregnancy, a miscarriage, a brief marriage, and a decade of penurious de facto marriage to the writer and editor John Middleton Murry, whom she finally married in 1918. She and Murry were close friends of writers such as Virginia Woolf  and D.H. Lawrence; Elizabeth von Arnim was a cousin. After tuberculosis was diagnosed, Katherine Mansfield lived mostly abroad. The Garden Party, her third and last book, came out in 1922. The Montana Stories contains all she wrote from July 1921 until her death.