Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), born Kathleen Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, the daughter of a banker, left for London at nineteen and never settled anywhere for long. Her life was turbulent, with a one-day marriage, a stillborn child, affairs with women and men, and the long partnership with the critic John Middleton Murry whom she finally married in 1918. Her stories, collected in In a German Pension, Bliss, and The Garden Party, abandoned plot for the shifting impressions of a moment and changed the English short story; Virginia Woolf admitted to being jealous of her writing. She died of tuberculosis at Fontainebleau at thirty-four, and Murry published her journals and letters.