A black and white photo of Katherine Mansfield, a white woman with short, wavy brown hair. She looks at the camera with a severe expression. She wears a white ruffled shirt.
“In the profoundest ocean
There is a rainbow shell.
It is always there, shining most stilly
Under the great storm waves
And under the happy little waves
That the old Greeks called "ripples of laughter."
And you listen, the rainbow shell
Sings - in the profoundest ocean.
It is always there, singing most silently!”
– Katherine Mansfield
Edward Carpenter, Virginia Woolf, and Oscar Wilde are some of the common names in discussions of queer history, and all have their connection to Katherine Mansfield. Originally named Kathleen Beauchamp, she would later take on Katherine Mansfield as a pen name. This name followed her for the rest of her life. Though she died young, she had an eventful life and left a legacy of queerness in her wake.
Born to a moderately wealthy family in New Zealand on 14 October 1888, she wrote stories about her childhood, and also kept meticulous journals. Writing about her time with her grandmother and her birth during a thunderstorm, to name a few.
Though she remembered her family as caring and sharing in her deep love for flowers, she also remembered her childhood as lonely.
She was the fattest of five siblings, and her family was often cruel because of this. They often believed she was less hardworking and intelligent than she was. She became a sullen girl and had difficulty connecting with the people around her. She found some comfort in her time alone, though, and spent much of it within her head. After moving into a larger home, she spent her time in her bedroom leaning out of her window and described it later:
“And I, leaning out of my window, alone, peering into the gloom, am seized by a passionate desire for everything that is hidden and forbidden. I want the night to come, and kiss me with her hot mouth, and lead me through an amethyst twilight to the place of the white gardenia. The laurestinus bush moves languidly, gently, backwards and forwards. There is a dull, heavy sound of clocks striking far away, and, in my room, darkness, emptiness, save for the ghostlike bed. I feel to lie there quiet, silent, passively cold would be too fearful—yet—quite a little fascinating.”
When she and her siblings transferred from their public school to a private one, she seemed to step out of her shell and make friends. It was also around this time that she began forming strong and possibly romantic bonds with other girls. One of the people who seemed to impact her the most and would later turn up in her stories was Maata.
Katherine and Maata’s fierce bond worried the school and her parents; while this was possibly because of perceived queerness, it is just as likely because Maata was Maori. Indeed, they did eventually start a romantic and sexual relationship in adulthood. Katherine would write about their relationship saying:
“I want Maata - I want her as I have had her - terribly. This is unclean I know but true. What an extraordinary thing - I feel savagely crude”
It was around this time that her love for writing would become apparent as well. She would enter and win writing contests, and she would remember the spark that ignited her focus on becoming an author writing:
“I’ve two’ kick offs’ in the writing game. One is joy—real joy—the thing that made me write when we lived at Pauline, and that sort of writing I could only do in just that state of being, in some perfectly blissful way at peace. Then something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath, knowing that all about it is warm and tender and ‘ready.’ And what I try, ever so humbly, to express.
The other ‘kick-off’ is my old original one, and, had I not known love, it would have been my all. Not hate or destruction (both are beneath contempt as real motives) but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster. … There! I got it exactly—a cry against corruption—that is absolutely the nail on the head. Not a protest—a cry …”
While she had found more friends within her new school, it was still clear that she was a more solitary girl. Close with a select few but hard to pin down by most.
Before moving on to university, she met Arnold Trowell, a cellist she became infatuated with before her departure. While it seems he never fully reciprocated her feelings, they started a correspondence that would become a close friendship and later a relationship.
Katherine attended Queens College in London in 1903. She fell into university with an ardour that would stay with her for the rest of her life. She began reading voraciously and made close bonds with other students. Among those closest to her was the woman who was arguably the love of her life.
Ida Baker, an aspiring author like Katherine, was the most consistent person in Katherine’s life. Together, they would come up with their pen names, both taking on their mothers’ maiden names. Ida Baker becoming L.M. to Katherine’s K.M., they would discuss their love for writing and eventually their love for each other. Katherine would write of their nights together often, once writing:
“A year ago we sat by the fire, she and I, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, speaking but little, and then whispering, because the room was so dark, the fire so low, and the rain outside so loud and bitter.
She, a thin little figure in a long, soft black frock, and a string of amethysts around her white throat.
Eventually it grew so cold that I dragged the blanket from the bed, and we wrapped ourselves up in it, smiling a little and saying, ‘We feel like children on a desert island.’ With one hand she held the rough, gaily-striped thing up to her chin; the other hand lay in mine. We talked of fame, how we both longed for it, how hard the struggle was, what we both meant to do. I found a piece of paper, and together we wrote a declaration vowing that in the space of one year we should both have become famous. And we signed the paper and sealed it; then, dedicating it to the gods, dropped it into the fire. For a moment a bright light, and then a handful of ashes. By and bye she fell asleep, and I gave her my share of the blanket, and arranged a sofa pillow in her low chair. The long night dragged coldly through, while I watched her, and thought, and longed, but could not sleep.”
It was not only Ida with whom she would fall in love. At university, she discovered and fell in love with Oscar Wilde. A close friend named Mimi introduced Katherine to the unexpurgated version of Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” which would become Katherine’s guiding light. She would, in many ways, emulate Wilde in her writing. In more personal ways, the white gardenia often found in her life and work is reminiscent of Wilde’s green carnation.
From there, she would find other queer writers. She wrote about the likes of Edward Carpenter in letters and even befriended some queer authors. No one seemed to touch her the way Oscar Wilde did though. She would annotate and copy down quotes from his work. More interestingly, she would begin writing some of her journal entries as letters to Oscar. Though the man himself had been dead for three years by the time she discovered his writing, he had a deep and powerful connection to Katherine.
There is a certain familiarity with looking to the past to find pathways into the future. However, it isn’t a perfect formula and Katherine Mansfield, more than most, is proof of this. Exploring queerness in 20th-century England is not always something that builds self-esteem, and Katherine already lacked in that department.
Despite popular narratives to the contrary, Oscar Wilde was not a careless dandy who was delighted by his queerness. He was self-hating and routinely attacked other members of the queer community, along with other marginalized groups.
Wilde’s work was formative for Katherine Mansfield, and that self-hate seeped in just as well as the witticisms. While “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was a massive influence on her understanding of her identity, there are tell-tale signs of its other impacts.
Similarities in writing and attitude are particularly evident in this passage she wrote:
“I think quite seriously that L. M. and I are so extraordinarily interesting. It is not while the thing is happening that I think that but the significance is near enough to rear its heels and make me start, too. Have I ruined her happy life—am I to blame? When I see her pale, and so tired that she shuffles her feet when she walks … when I see the buttons hanging off her coats, and her skirt torn—why do I call myself to account for all this—and feel that I am responsible for her. She gave me the gift of herself. ‘Take me, Katie, I am yours. I will serve you and watch in your ways, Katie.’ I ought to have made a happy being of her and ought to have ‘answered her prayers’—they cost me so little and they were so humble. I ought to have proved my own worthiness of a disciple—but I did not. Yes, I am altogether to blame. Sometimes I excuse myself. ‘We were too much of an age. I was experimenting and being hurt when she leaned upon me—I couldn’t have stopped the sacrifice if I’d wanted to.’ But it’s all altered to-night…. I came upon her … crouched by my fire like a little animal. So I helped her to bed on the sofa and have made hot drink and brought her some rugs and my dark eiderdown. And as I tucked her up, she was so touching—her long fair hair—so familiar—remembered for so long, drawn back from her face—that it was easy to stoop and kiss her—not as I usually do—one little half kiss—but quick long kisses such as one delights to give a tired child. ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘I have dreamed of this …’ Ah, how I long to talk about it sometimes—not for a moment but until I am tired out and have got rid of the burden of memory. Yet it would be madness to expect J. to understand or to sympathise …”
During her continued relationship with her cellist Arnold, she met another queer person: a gay man named Rudolph. She and Rudolph did not especially get along. Upon his death by suicide, though, she was deeply impacted and fell into a depression. Antony Alpers commented,
“The circumstances which belong to the world of Oscar Wilde, and the love that dare not spread its name, were very disturbing to Katherine Mansfield. Did that sort of thing lead to suicide?”
In 1908 Katherine’s depression would escalate to suicidal thoughts that she described in her journal, writing:
“I purchase my brilliance with my life. It were better that I were dead already, but I am unlike others because I have experienced all there is to experience. But there is no one to help me. Of course, Oscar, “Dorian Gray” has brought this to pass. I am now so much worse than ever. Madness must lie this way. Pull yourself up!”
It thus becomes impossible to detangle the hurt caused by her reading of Oscar Wilde from the benefit. There is solidarity, an ability to see the truth of things between queer people, but also a double-edged sword.
She was no longer alone, but visions of a future filled with pain and death surrounded her.
After she finished university, she returned to New Zealand, where she began to write voraciously. Long letters to L.M. and short stories started to pile on top of each other. However, she had difficulty adjusting to a quieter life in New Zealand under her parent’s roof. This time would mark the true beginning of her career as an author. She often thought of her time in London writing:
“Here in my room I feel as though I was in London—in London. To write the word makes me feel that I could burst into tears. Isn’t it terrible to love anything so much? I do not care at all for men, but London—it is Life …”
She was able to begin a relationship with another author, Edith Kathleen Bendall. From this relationship came some of her most detailed and frank writings about her sexuality.
“I feel more powerfully all those so-termed sexual impulses with her than I have with any men. I feel that to lie with my head on her breast is to feel what life can hold. Pillowed against her, clinging to her hands, her face against mine, I am a child, a woman and more than half man. We lay down together still silently. She, every now and then pressing me to her, kissing me, my head on her breasts, her hands around my body stroking me lovingly - what an experience! And when we returned to town small wonder that I could not sleep but tossed to-and-fro and yearned and realized a thousand things which had been obscure.”
While she still kept male lovers, her attraction to women was stronger. Her relationships with men may have been an attempt to appease society. However, considering how often she broke the rules with men, it seems unlikely. She would likely be described today as bisexual, with a preference toward women.
Many of her relationships were long and overlapped with one another. Through all of her lovers, she always stayed connected to L.M. Though their relationship changed over time, L.M. was still there for her. She was often getting the worst of Katherine.
Much of Katherine’s writing suggests an attempt to keep herself separate from L.M., possibly for fear of corrupting her as was clear in one of the earlier passages. It shows up again when Katherine wrote:
“All that week [L.M.] had her little corner. ‘I may come into my little corner tonight?’ she asks timidly, and I reply—so cold, so cynical—‘If you want to.’ But what would I do if she didn’t come?”
Known by many as a social chameleon who adapted to the people around her, her letters and interactions with L.M. often hold the more painful parts. To the point of having L.M. be surprised when she saw happy photographs of Katherine, as in her letters, she had seemed so sad.
Known by many as a social chameleon able to adapt to those around her, Katherine and L.M.’s letters told another story. Their correspondence held the painful parts of Katherine’s life—so much so that, when she saw happy photographs of Katherine, L.M. reacted with surprise.
It is clear though that Katherine felt their separation even when she was in other romantic relationships, writing:
“You sent me a letter from L. M. which was simply marvellous. She wrote, as she can, you know, of all sorts of things, grass and birds and little animals and herself and our friendship with that kind of careless, very infinite joy—There is something quite absolute in Lesley—She said at the end of a page—‘Katie, dearie—what is Eternity?’ She’s about the nearest thing to eternal that I could ever imagine. I wish she were not so far away …”
Eventually returning to London in 1908, Katherine Mansfield did not find it as welcoming as she had the first time. She fell into a deep depressive episode and struggled with poverty. When she became pregnant, she scrambled to find and marry a gay man to manage the situation. She attended her own wedding wearing all black and brought only L.M. along.
She abandoned the marriage quickly, and her mother interceded. Her mother took her to a spa for treatment said to cure “sexual problems.” By the end of the stay, Katherine miscarried and refused to return to her husband. Her mother returned to New Zealand and wrote Katherine out of her will.
From this point, Katherine’s life remained tempestuous. While her career kept a steady upward momentum, her relationships and health changed dramatically and often.
She later remarried a man named John Murry. Though she left him multiple times, the couple remained married until her death. Through all of life’s upheavals, the one constant remained L.M.
Their relationship often mirrored Katherine’s attitudes towards New Zealand, which she would view with contempt and adoration throughout her life. Katherine often took L.M. for granted, but the love between the two was always there. Until her death by tuberculosis in 1923, L.M. and Katherine would return to each other.
Their relationship can be summed up by a poem Katherine wrote to L.M.:
“In the profoundest ocean
There is a rainbow shell.
It is always there, shining most stilly
Under the great storm waves
And under the happy little waves
That the old Greeks called "ripples of laughter."
And you listen, the rainbow shell
Sings - in the profoundest ocean.
It is always there, singing most silently!”
[Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material]
Foundation, P. (2020, September 18). Katherine Mansfield (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/) [Text/html]. Poetry Foundation; Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/katherine-mansfield
Katherine Mansfield. (n.d.-a). Katherine Mansfield House & Garden. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://www.katherinemansfield.com/about/katherine-mansfield
Katherine Mansfield. (n.d.-b). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://natlib.govt.nz/researchers/guides/katherine-mansfield
Katherine Mansfield and Oscar Wilde. 31 Oct. (n.d.). Literature Cambridge. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/book-online-study-sessions/km-ow
Katherine Mansfield transcript » PrideNZ.com. (n.d.). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from http://www.pridenz.com/queer_history_katherine_mansfield_transcript.html
Taonga, N. Z. M. for C. and H. T. M. (n.d.). Mansfield, Katherine [Web page]. Ministry for Culture and Heritage Te Manatu Taonga. Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3m42/mansfield-katherine
The Life of Katherine Mansfield | NZETC. (n.d.). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ManLife.html