Her works are celebrated across the world and have been published in 25 languages. Born and raised in a house on Tinakori Road in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon , Mansfield was the third child in the Beauchamp family. She began school in Karori with her sisters, before attending Wellington Girls' College. The Beauchamp girls later switched to the elite Fitzherbert Terrace School, where Mansfield became friends with Maata Mahupuku , who became a muse for early work and with whom she is believed to have had a passionate relationship.
Mansfield wrote short stories and poetry under a variation of her own name, Katherine Mansfield, which explored anxiety , sexuality , Christianity , and existentialism alongside a developing New Zealand identity. When she was 19, she left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in , and she died in France aged Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in into a socially prominent Wellington family in Thorndon.
Her grandfather Arthur Beauchamp briefly represented the Picton electorate in parliament. Her extended family included the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim , and her great-granduncle was a Victorian artist Charles Robert Leslie.
Mansfield had two elder sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother. She used some of those memories as an inspiration for the short story " Prelude ". The family returned to Wellington in Mansfield's first printed stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School magazine [ 2 ] in and In , Mansfield became enamoured of Arnold Trowell , a cellist, but her feelings were for the most part not reciprocated. She moved to London in , where she attended Queen's College with her sisters.
Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed she would take up professionally, [ 8 ] but she began contributing to the college newspaper with such dedication that she eventually became its editor.
