Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923)

New Zealand writer. She lived most of her life in England. Her delicate artistry emerges not only in her volumes of short stories – such as In a German Pension (1911), Bliss (1920), and The Garden Party (1923) – but also in her letters and journal. She developed the technique of the short story in much the same way as Irish writer James Joyce and English writer Virginia Woolf developed the novel; in particular Mansfield recognized that fiction survives if it recreates life, and she was a pioneer of the central character as narrator.

Born near Wellington, New Zealand, she was educated in London. She returned to London after a two-year visit home, where she published her earliest stories. She married the critic John Middleton Murry in 1913.