Katherine Mansfield

Before she was an acclaimed modernist short fiction writer, Mansfield was born “Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp”, the third child of Harold and Annie Beauchamp. She was born upstairs at 25 Tinakori Road on a Sunday afternoon in 1888, while “seasonal gales battered the city” and the population was ravaged by an epidemic of typhoid.  

In 1887, affluent businessman Harold Beauchamp had leased a section of land in Thorndon from Sir Charles Clifford of Staffordshire. Beauchamp built a two-storey town house on the land the very next year, and the family moved in. This was the house we would come to know as Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace, which was converted into a museum and opened to the public in 1988. Robin Hyde described the house, unflatteringly, as “very square, very ugly, much too heavy for a heart like Katherine’s”, but in the late 1880s, it was a busy town house for a wealthy young family; home to Mansfield, her siblings, her mother and father, as well as Annie Beauchamp’s youngest siblings and widowed mother.  

The typhoid epidemic must have coloured Mansfield’s earliest memories of Wellington. It certainly seems to have influenced some of her fiction. A fear of filth and infectious disease reverberates through ‘A Birthday’, and even makes its appearance at the edges of more genteel settings, such as ‘A Garden Party’ or ‘A Dolls House’. Council minute books confirm that the contagion would have been caused and exacerbated by polluted waterways and poor waste disposal infrastructure, but the prevalence of ‘miasma theory’ means that the foul odours of the central city were thought to be responsible. The death toll from the epidemic tragically comes to include Mansfield’s newborn baby sister Gwendoline in 1891.  

It is clear then, why Harold moved the family to the breezy green hills of Karori in 1893 for “the benefit not only of the children’s health, but also [his] own”. Karori is where Mansfield would spend her school years. Her 1918 short story ‘Prelude’ follows the Burnells’ efforts to move to the countryside in a fictionalised version of Mansfield’s own relocation to Karori (incidentally, Mansfield’s mother was “Annie Burnell Dyer”, and gives her name to Burnell Avenue in Thorndon). It perhaps gives some insight to how it might have felt; the push and pull between isolation, peace and unease. 

The family returned to the central city some years later to live in Fitzherbert Terrace. Mansfield published her first story in a High School magazine in 1898 and was later sent to Queens College, London to further her education in 1903. She returned only briefly to Wellington between 1906-1908, when she left again, never to return.  

Mansfield’s adult life is spent in Europe. It is here where she publishes most of her stories, marries, and forms her famous literary friendships. But though she spends the rest of her days travelling and writing on the other side of the world, Mansfield’s complex relationship with Wellington resurfaces in her work, again and again, until her passing in 1922. 

In 1932, Mansfield’s father Harold Beauchamp pursued plans to erect a memorial tramway shelter near where the family had lived in Fitzherbert Terrace during his daughter’s last months in New Zealand. The Katherine Mansfield memorial opened in 1933, a public tribute to one of our most iconic literary residents, and a personal one from a father to his child.  

Note: this item owes particular thanks and acknowledgement to Redmer Yska and the research completed for "A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield's Wellington" 2017, Otago University Press.