Sunday 14th of October is Katherine Mansfield’s birthday. But she won’t be having a party because she died in 1923, aged 34.
Who’s Katherine Mansfield? She is a very well-known author that grew up in Wellington. Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace is a great place to visit on Tinakori Road, if you’re looking for something to so during the school holidays. Her family also lived in Karori and other places along Tinakori Road. She went to Wellington Girls College.
She wrote a lot of famous stories in the early 1900s describing her childhood and life in Wellington and New Zealand. Her stories are described as ‘classics’ just like you might think of Peter Pan, or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a classic. She spent a lot of her adult life in Europe between England and France, and was living over there during World War 1 (her brother was killed during the war).
Katherine Mansfield caught tuberculosis, and while she was trying to recover she wrote some of her most loved and famous stories: At the Bay, The Garden Party and The Doll’s House. She died on the 9th of january 1923 in London and is buried there.
Her stories have inspired many famous writers and she was part of a new writing movementcalled ‘modernism’
You can find out more about one of our most famous writers here, and the Wikipedia article also contains some great info.