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Katherine Mansfield, "Bliss"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1888–1923)

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was an accomplished cellist who studied music at Queen's College, London.At her parents' urging she returned to New Zealand, where, instead of settling down as they wished, she turned to writing at the age of 20. She moved back to London, dropped her last name, and began publishing story collections including In a German Pension (1911); Bliss (1920), which established her reputation; The Garden-Party (1922); and The Dove's Nest (1923). A longtime companion of John Middleton Murry, she was friends with (and a literary rival of) D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. She died suddenly in 1923, while in France trying to cure her tuberculosis.A final volume of stories, Something Childish, was published shortly thereafter. Novels and Novelists, a collection of essays, appeared in 1930 and her Collected Stories in 1937.

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