The Biography of Katherine Mansfield

Danzeng Baizhen
                                            0610091032
                                        Professor Stephen Hoyle
                                        Academic Writing Class
              The biography of Katherine Mansfield

    Katherine Mansfield was born into the household of a rich merchant and banker in Wellington, New Zealand in 1988, her family was a socially prominent middle class colonial family with a banker father, Harold Beauchamp, and a genteel origin mother, Annie Burnell Dyer. She had two older sisters and a younger brother; she was also the first cousin of author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim (“Katherine Mansfield”). The Beauchamp family moved to Karori in 1893, a rural village in the hills a few miles from Wellington, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood. Later she published her first text at the age of nine (Kirkpatrick 12).

    In the 1903, as the first step in her rebellion against her background, she left for London to study at Queen’s College, along with her two sisters, and she became a member of the college magazine. She stayed there for three years and after that she went back to New Zealand in 1906. She then started to become interested in music and had relationships with men as well as women. Her father denied her the opportunity to become a professional cellist, but later on she became an accomplished cellist. In 1908, she entered Wellington Technical College to study typing and bookkeeping (Kirkpatrick 14).

    After that her lifelong friend Ida Baker persuading Mansfield’s father to allow her to move back to England with an allowance of ￡100per year. There she devoted herself to writing and had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. (Books and writers.com) In later years, she would express both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals and never visited New Zealand again (“Katherine Mansfield”).

    In 1909, she married George Bowen, a singing...