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Katherine MansfieldA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is remembered as a key figure of the Modernist movement. She is known for her essays, short stories, and articles.
Mansfield was born into an upper-class family in Wellington, New Zealand. While attending the Wellington Girls’ High School, she explored a passionate relationship with Maata Mahupuku, who is believed to be Mansfield’s first female lover and had a tremendous influence on Mansfield’s writing about sexuality and nationality. Mahupuku was the granddaughter of a Māori chief, perhaps influencing one of Mansfield’s trademark themes: feeling disillusioned as a New Zealander because of the institutionalized maltreatment of the Māori people.
In 1903, Mansfield moved to London to attend Queen’s College. After extensive travel, she returned to New Zealand to write. However, she grew bored with the slower pace of life and returned to Europe, where she spent the rest of her life. She journaled extensively and described her bohemian romantic relationships at length. After discovering that a man she had feelings for was seeing another woman, she quickly became impregnated by his brother; however, his family disapproved of her, and she decided to marry another man (the marriage was quickly annulled). Her mother arrived in Europe and sent her daughter to Germany, where she miscarried.
The next few years of her life included prolific writing, travel, declining health, and a series of affairs, marriages, and divorces. At the start of World War I, she was living in England. She was very affected by her brother’s death after he was killed in action in Belgium in 1915. After being diagnosed with tuberculosis, she moved to France, where she wrote extensively and traveled with friends searching for a cure. She died at age 34 after suffering a pulmonary embolism.
She is remembered most for her short story collections, especially Bliss and Other Stories, The Garden Party and Other Stories, and The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories.
Mansfield was a key figure of literary Modernism. Key tenets of Modernism include embracing the abstract, rejecting realism and religion, experimenting with language, and utilizing the bricolage technique of constructing a new piece of art from a diverse range of influences. Modernist language experiments ranged from Ernest Hemingway’s sparse, economical prose to the impressionistic stream-of-consciousness narration employed by writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Modernist artists and creators eschewed traditional hierarchies and binaries, often embracing a bohemian lifestyle that scorned heteronormativity and capitalism.
Several notable modernists (including T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein) were self-proclaimed expats, and Mansfield’s sense of disconnect from New Zealand catalyzed her zeal to start a new life in Europe. Frustrated with her home country’s slow pace of life and historical racism, she sought refuge in a more open-minded and unconventional society.
However, moving to Europe in the early 20th century gave her a front-row seat to World War I, which also greatly influenced the Modernist movement. World War I helped modernists articulate the notion that traditional forms and theories have no place in a modernizing, industrial world, upending the Victorian notion of inevitable progress and trust in the imperial mission. Through art, novels, poetry, short stories, and newer mediums like film and photography, Modernist creators asked their audiences to consider which institutions and ideas are worth trusting in the modern world.
Mansfield’s short stories were well received by an audience accustomed to literary Realism in the Victorian tradition and were considered more “palatable” streams of consciousness in comparison to the more extreme narrations of Woolf and Joyce.
By Katherine Mansfield