Katherine Mansfield’s tragic life

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) had many self-destructive and tragic love affairs.  In New Zealand, after the young musician Tom Trowell had rejected her, the teenaged Mansfield rebounded to his twin brother Garnet.  He got her pregnant and abandoned her, and all her love affairs were attempts to compensate for this cruel rejection.  She also had two youthful liaisons with women: the beautiful Maori, Maata, and her older friend Edie Bendall.  Romantic, impulsive and reckless in England, she was eager to sleep with any man who caught her fancy and liked to have two rivals fighting for her favors.  Her early lovers included, besides Garnet, the Polish Florian Sobieniowski, who returned to haunt her and blackmailed her to conceal her shameful letters; the New Age journalist J. M. Kennedy; the schoolmaster William Orton; and the French writer Francis Carco, whom she visited behind the lines during the Great War.  Garnet, Florian and the handsome young Francis Heinemann got her pregnant.  Every man let her down, and she suffered one stillbirth and endured several abortions.

She married the musician George Bowden to cover her pregnancy with Garnet and left her husband, baffled and frustrated, the next morning.  If she had slept with Bowden, the pregnant Mansfield could have claimed him as the father of her child.  She based a fictional character on Bowden, echoing the first letters of his surname by calling him a “howling bore.”  Virginia Woolf, who was frigid and didn’t sleep with her husband, was intrigued and excited by Mansfield’s adventurous love life.  The society hostess Ottoline Morrell also found her “inscrutable and fascinating.”

In Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life (Reaktion, 303p, £20/$32), Gerri Kimber is hostile to Mansfield’s second husband, the literary man John Middleton Murry. She calls him “Machiavellian”, though he was more naïve than cunning.  But she doesn’t explain why Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence both admired and loved him.  Murry, an innovative editor, was handsome, charming and well-educated, but he was also unreliable, unfaithful and treacherous.  He had an affair with her friend Dorothy Brett while Mansfield was still alive, and living in France, not as Kimber writes “after her death,” and she was greatly hurt by it.

Murry recorded in his late journal of 1953: “Katherine wanted to annihilate her past.  She never mentioned her relations with men—and I was made to feel that any reference to, or curiosity about, it would be unwelcome, and hurting.”  Yet Kimber criticises Murry, who “glossed over Mansfield’s misdemeanors after her death in order to sanctify her personality”.  She thinks Murry should have publicly revealed Mansfield’s gonorrhea to delight her family and attract the prurient public.  There’s a striking similarity between Murry’s relations with Mansfield and Ted Hughes’ with Sylvia Plath.  Mansfield, who died aged 34, and Plath, who died aged 30, had most of their work published by their husbands after their death.  Both Murry and Hughes censored and then exploited their wives’ work in order to extinguish their own guilty sexual betrayals.  But their editorial interference also greatly enhanced the posthumous reputations of these brilliant young women.

Murry did not prevent Ruth Mantz from writing her life of Mansfield.  She was unable to complete the book by herself and could not have published it without his help.  Kimber asserts, there “never was a couple less suited to each other than Mansfield and Murry”, though they remained together till the end.  One immediately recalls the far more disastrous marriages of
T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Saul Bellow.

A. R. Orage, the editor of the New Age,who published Mansfield’s early work, also became her lover and influenced her life. His head was overloaded with mystical garbage, theosophy and “esoteric spiritual beliefs,” and he gave Mansfield the crackpot tomes Light on the Path and Karma and Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego. His bogus booklet, On Love, Freely Adapted from the Tibetan, was not adapted from Tibetan.  In a clear-minded 1912 review in Rhythm, just after Mansfield first broke with Orage, she declared: “Mysticism is perverted sensuality; it is a ‘passionate’ admiration for that which has no reality at all.  It is a paraphernalia of clichés.”  Yet Kimber unconvincingly claims that Orage gave her “something precious and endearing, as this biography reveals.”  Murry, the villain of this book, “disliked occult teachings” and warned Mansfield to stay away from Orage’s fraudulent guru, George Gurdjieff.  An example of Gurdjieff’s profundity, which Mansfield would have mocked if she were well, was “I teach that when it rains, the pavements get wet.”

Desperately ill with tuberculosis at the end of her life, and reeling from doctor to doctor who promised to help but actually hurt her, Mansfield sought a spiritual cure.  Emphasising Gurdjieff’s kindness and generosity, Kimber mistakenly states, “the death of a famous English writer at his Institute would certainly not aid his cause in any way.”  But every self-proclaimed guru wants to attract famous disciples (like the Beatles) who would capture other followers.  Without Mansfield’s fame, Gurdjieff would be forgotten.  After a lifetime of studying Mansfield, Kimber, following Orage, endorses Gurdjieff’s belief that breathing the fumes of cow manure in a stable was a salutary treatment for Mansfield’s tuberculosis.  Kimber’s astonishing conclusion, which denies all the facts, is “the precious few weeks Mansfield spent [with Gurdjieff] brought her back into the life of the living.”  Lawrence, angry about how Mansfield had been deceived and exploited, truthfully declared, “I know it is a rotten, false, self-conscious place of people playing a sickly stunt.”

Kimber has some new information about Mansfield’s miserable relations with Bowden, Sobienowski and Orage, but her book does not reveal, as the subtitle claims, Mansfield’s “Hidden Life.”  Kimber’s vainglorious boasts to challenge previous conceptions and offer innovative readings —”for the first time,” “never revealed before”—are not justified.  In a typical innovative reading, she quotes Mansfield’s early story—“All alone she was.  All alone with her soul.  She lived on the top of a solitary hill”—and praises “the hauntingly poetic, lyrical, almost mythical quality” of this sentimental tripe.

This book is maddeningly repetitive, often on the same page and even in the same paragraph.  Kimber repeats, almost verbatim, three pages from the Introduction later in the book, and takes up two other pages with five long indented quotes by other writers.  Her repetition gives one the impression of reading the same book twice.  It seems that she has poured parts of her previous book, Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), into this one.

Like many biographers, Kimber overrates her subject and claims that Mansfield is “possibly the twentieth century’s most gifted sort-story writer.”  This blindly ignores far greater story writers: Conrad, Kipling, Joyce, Lawrence, Babel and Hemingway (who, like Mansfield, improbably played the cello).

Several errors and omissions appear in this book.  The phrase “clotted nonsense” is not by John Dryden, but by Samuel Johnson in his “Life of Dryden”.  Kimber doesn’t see that Mansfield named her close friend Lesley Moore after her brother Leslie, and that Mansfield’s reference to Van Gogh’s “sea captain in a flat cap” describes his Postman Joseph Roulin (1888).  Nietzsche does not belong with Pater, Wilde and the English Decadent poets.  Kimber doesn’t note that Mansfield’s vignette of 1911 describing Orage mimics the famous 1882 photo of Nietzsche and Paul Rée pulling Lou Andreas Salomé in a cart: “in front a man [Orage] is between the shafts of a hand-barrow. . . . The man is followed by a big bundle of a woman”, his lover Beatrice Hastings.  Kimber doesn’t realize that Mansfield’s famous “I’ve been a selective camera”, which influenced Isherwood’s “I am a camera”, transformed Emerson’s phrase in “Nature”: “I am a transparent eyeball” that takes in all that nature has to offer.  Mansfield’s disease inspired her writing and she was most productive when she was ill.  In “A Birthday”, “a selfish husband considers his own mental strain during the process of childbirth rather than his wife’s physical pain,” and anticipates the same theme of Hemingway’s “In Another Country” (1927).

Kimber misinterprets several important aspects of Mansfield’s life.  She had four siblings and did not feel “solitary and isolated” with them.  Since her father was very wealthy and had many servants, it’s absurd to state that in New Zealand her grandmother did “the housekeeping and the cooking”.  Mansfield acted in silent films, was a compère in a nightclub and had great comic skills, so her voice was not “monotonous and inflectionless”. When Beatrice Hastings became jealous of Mansfield’s affair with Hastings’ lover Orage, she would not have “suggested that Mansfield live with them”, but would try to keep her away from their flat.  It was difficult for Mansfield to accept the fact that her beloved brother Leslie had died an unheroic war death by carelessly blowing himself to bits with his own hand grenade.  Kimber lacks compassion by stating that when Mansfield was desperately poor, depressed, sick and betrayed by Murry, and craved love and affection, the visit from her sister and aunt was “the last thing Mansfield wanted”.

Kimber quotes but does not discuss three passages equal to Mansfield’s best stories.  Her letter of May 1916 about Lawrence and Frieda’s violent conflicts is vivid, dramatic and satiric: “I don’t know which disgusts one worse—when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda’s hair and saying ‘I’ll cut your bloody throat, you bitch’. . . . Suddenly Lawrence appeared and made a kind of horrible rush at her and they began to scream and scuffle.  All the while she screamed for Murry to help her.”  The spectacle of their savage and exciting sexual foreplay was very different from her more sedate quarrels with Murrry.

In an unusual and perceptive diary entry of September 1911, Mansfield admires her own exotic garments, as if she were looking into mirror, while being admired by her lover while they have sex: “In the most natural manner we slowly undressed. . . . It grew dark.  I crouched against him like a wild cat.  Quite impersonally I admired my silver stockings bound beneath the knee with spiked ribbons, my yellow suede shoes fringed with white fur.  How vicious I looked!  We made love to each other like two wild beasts.”  She accurately and effectively portrays herself as a “wild cat” and “wild beast”.

In August 1920, like John Keats, Mansfield described her diseased lungs: “I cough and cough and at each breath a dragging boiling bubbling sound is heard.  I feel my whole chest is boiling.  I sip water, spit, sip, spit.  I feel I must break my heart.  And I can’t expand my chest—it’s as though the chest had collapsed.  Life is getting a new breath.  Nothing else counts.”  It’s heartbreaking to see how this beautiful, young, brave woman gasps for a breath of life and hears the echo of her death in her diseased lung.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (1978), introduced the privately printed edition of her Four Poems (1980) and the Vintage edition of her Stories (1991).  His book The Biographer’s Quest appeared in April 2026 with a chapter on Mansfield.

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