'Trying out' other lives

 

“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better by far to write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” – Katherine Mansfield

 

Born on this date in 1888, Mansfield – the pen name of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp – was raised in New Zealand and had her first stories published at age 16 in the High School Reporter, a New Zealand-wide journal

 

Barely out of high school, she wrote a hard-hitting series of stories taking New Zealand’s white elite to task for their treatment of the native Maori.  At age 19, finding herself the target of severe criticism and exclusion, she decided to emigrate to England.  There, she not only advanced her career but also became close friends with such modernist writers as D.H. Lawrence (author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and Virginia Woolf, and quickly became one of England’s most popular modernist writers.   

 

But just when she was getting into her most prolific writing period – in the late 19-teens – she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died from the disease in 1923.  John Middleton Murry, her husband and editor of the popular magazine Rhythm, then led an effort to posthumously publish many of her writings throughout the 1920s – continuing her popularity and legacy.

 

In 1973, Mansfield was the subject of the BBC miniseries A Picture of Katherine Mansfield starring Vanessa Redgrave, and in 2011 the film Bliss focused on her early beginnings as a writer.  Writing, Mansfield said, was not only her life but her chance to experience other’s lives.  

 

“Would you not like to try all sorts of lives?” she asked.  “That is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.”