'Trying out' other lives

 

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

 

Bornon 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 inthe High School Reporter, a New Zealand-wide journal

 

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

 

Butjust 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 throughoutthe 1920s – continuing her popularity and legacy.

 

In1973, Mansfield was the subject of the BBC miniseries A Picture ofKatherine Mansfield starring Vanessa Redgrave, and in 2011 thefilm Bliss focused on her early beginnings as a writer.  Writing,Mansfield said, was not only her life but her chance to experience other’slives.  

 

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