Born in Wellington, Kathleen Beauchamp went to school in London with two of her sisters in 1903 and returned to New Zealand only briefly and somewhat reluctantly before finally departing in 1908. During this return, however, she journeyed into the Urewera and came to know more of her country. In London she was part of the Bloomsbury set, experimenting both with her craft and her way of life. Her marriage to a publisher, John Middleton Murry, turbulent as it appeared, provided not only personal and professional support but also a devoted literary executor. Throughout her restless life she moved frequently between England and France, especially needing the southern warmth to help ease her tuberculosis. Yet her five volumes of short stories, written under the nom-de-plume of Katherine Mansfield, convey an acute sense of the physical and social environment of Wellington in the early twentieth century.

Katherine Mansfield’s stories always have relationships among people at their heart. Especially after her brother was killed in action in 1915, she wrote as “a debt of love” “to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world”. Her style, meticulously honed, with every word weighed, is distinctive and inimitable. For many years she was the most widely-known New Zealand literary figure, and through her literature introduced the country of her childhood to a readership far beyond its shores.