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The Young Katherine Mansfield

In her edition of the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) expresses her dismay at editor William Knight’s decision to omit details about Wordsworth’s domestic life. Alongside Knight’s claim that there was ‘no need’ to include such trivial information, Mansfield scrawls ‘Why not, FOOL!’. This attention to the small and to the specific —the feeling of a hand pressed against a window, or the gritty taste of sandwiches at the beach—appears in much of Mansfield’s own work, especially her short-story collections Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922). And it is a similar attentiveness—one of which Mansfield herself would undoubtedly approve—that underlies Gerri Kimber’s latest biography of the modernist author, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years. In this new work, Kimber takes on the challenging task of reassessing Katherine Mansfield’s childhood, from her birth in 1888 to her final departure to London in 1908. Before she was known as Katherine Mansfield, the acclaimed short-story author, Mansfield was Kathleen Beauchamp, the middle daughter of a well-off family in Wellington, New Zealand, where she spent most of the first 19 years of her life. The period is a contested one in Mansfield research. Although she would draw on these childhood experiences for many of her most celebrated stories, including ‘The Garden Party’ (1921), ‘Prelude’ (1918) and ‘At the Bay’ (1922), few biographers have focused on her life before 1908 (Kimber 2016: 1). As Anna Plumridge has argued in her recent edition of Mansfield’s early notebook, The Urewera Notebook, critics who have studied the young Mansfield often pursue a particular editorial agenda, depicting the writer as an incipient genius or a rugged colonial, at the expense of a more complex truth (Plumridge 2015: 23–43). To Mansfield scholars, the young Katherine—known as Kass to her family and friends—is a figure at once familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown. In order to understand Katherine Mansfield, as Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, £30.00 hardback 978 0 74868145 7.