Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on 14 October 1888; at the time of her birth, according to an autobiographical story, a “tremendous gust of wind sprang upon the house, seized it, shook it, dropped, only to grip it the more tightly”. She was to seize and shake her respectable middle-class family in the course of her short life by the intensity of her passion for exploration, in personal experience and in her writing. She came of pioneering stock: her father, Harold Beauchamp, was born among the diggings in the Australian gold fields. He was determined not be become a colonial drifter like his father, and moved with determination up the social scale in the Empire City, as Wellington was known, until he had

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First published 30 March 2001

Citation: Smith, Angela. "Katherine Mansfield". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 March 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2924, accessed 9 February 2010.]