maybe you already know all there is to know about katherine mansfield

If so, this post is not for you.

I'm reading Katie Roiphe's brilliant Uncommon Arrangements, which is full of jaw-droppers. It's about unconventional early twentieth century marriages, and one of them is Katherine's to John Middleton Murry. In one page, we learn that Katherine grew up as Kathleen 'Kass' Beauchamp, daughter of an affluent New Zealand banker. She spent her girlhood in her room reading Flaubert and Wilde and playing her cello.

She arrived in London, had an affair with a teenaged violinist who smoked cigarettes out of a holder and got pregnant. Then she got engaged to a music teacher called George Bowden, wearing a black suit to the wedding. When they went to consummate the marriage, she 'lost heart' and ran away without explanation.

Then, travelling under the name Kathe Beauchamp-Bowden, she settled in a Bavarian hotel where, at some point, she miscarried. Reading this, I wonder whether the Bavarian hotel might not have been some kind of clinic. She became friendly with a Polish translator, Floryan Sobienowski, and I think you can guess what that means.* She got gonorrhoea, anyway. At this point, she was 22. When I was 22, I had done less of some things than Katherine Mansfield, and more of others.


* This reminds of a Wodehouse line I read the other day. The narrator is speaking to an explorer:

"Well, the natives seemed fairly friendly, so I decided to stay the night."

I made a mental note never to seem fairly friendly to an explorer.