Katherine Mansfield
New Zealand born writer who fell in love with the French Riviera
Katherine Mansfield’s life was both terribly short and terribly complicated, with tumultuous love affairs with both men and women. However, her short but intense love affair with the South of France would last until her death from tuberculosis at just 34 years old.
The famous writer was born in Wellington, New Zealand as Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp, and moved to England in her teens to study at Queen’s College. Following a tempestuous stint back in New Zealand where she battled with her conservative parents and the perceived provincialism of her home country, she returned to England.
Her life there (as everywhere) was driven by drama. She had an affair with a cello player, and then fell pregnant to another man before they broke up. She quickly married a piano teacher, but left him the same day before the marriage could be consummated-although she remained technically married to him for the next seven years. Her mother arrived from New Zealand and, blaming her daughter’s bisexuality for the marriage collapse, dispatched her daughter to a German sanatorium with the intention of curing the ‘unnatural friendship’ she thought her daughter was having with one of her close female friends, the writer Ida Baker. (In this case it was untrue, but Mansfield did have other female lovers that she wrote about in her journals). While at the sanatorium, Mansfield miscarried and her mother wrote her out of her will.
She fell in love with the magazine editor Middleton Murray soon after, whom she would eventually marry, although they separated several times and she carried on with numerous affairs during the relationship.
During this time Mansfield wrote fierce, candid and brave short stories, magazine articles and poems that dealt with sex, love, social divisions, war and mortality. She also wrote of her family and home country, and particularly more so after the death of her beloved brother on the battlefields of the Western Front in 1915.
She discovered the Riviera that same year, staying in the Hotel Beau Rivage at Bandol, and later renting the Villa Pauline, with its view over the sea from the cliffs. She adored the light and scenes of the Riviera, writing to her husband Murray,
“I’ve just been for a walk on my small boulevard and looking down below at the houses all bright in the sun and housewives washing their linen in great tubs of glittering water and flinging it over the orange trees to dry. Perhaps all human activity is beautiful in the sunlight.”
While back in England In 1917, Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and like so many other consumptives, went to the South of France- a region long lauded as having miracle healing powers. Of course, it had no such thing, and Mansfield also soon discovered that the grim war years had taken their toll on the South of France that she so loved. Mansfield spent a winter in a cold and almost empty hotel in Bandol, somewhat depressed and in poor health but writing short stories, such as the wonderfully named Je ne parle pas francais. Bliss and Other Stories was also published in this time, as she moved back and forth for the next few years between the French and Italian Rivieras and England.
In September 1920, Mansfield moved to Menton and embarked upon both the most wonderfully creative, and the final, period of her writing life. Living in a two storey villa called Isola Bella that overlooked the sea, surrounded by gardens full of wattle and citrus trees, Katherine Mansfield was happy. She wrote two of her best works in Menton- the novellas The Daughters of the Late Colonel and Miss Brill, with her great friend Ida Baker as a companion.
She sickened soon after and moved to sanatoriums and monasteries looking for a cure that would not come for more than another two decades. She died in 1923, not long after writing in her journal ‘I just pine for the S. of France.’
