Katherine Mansfield: Bloomsbury relationships and connections

This paper will explore the relationships and connections between Katherine Mansfield and various people connected to the Bloomsbury group. In particular, I will focus on D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and S.S. Koteliansky. Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murry, like D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, were never really part of ‘Bloomsbury’ proper. Mansfield was a colonial with a father in trade, albeit Chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and a Knight of the Realm by 1923. Murry was a scholarship boy from very lower middle class Peckham, and Lawrence’s father had been a miner. But being literary, and bohemian, their lives inevitably crossed with the ‘Blooms Berries’, as Mansfield called them, and friendships were formed – and broken. By the time Mansfield had met Woolf at the end of 1916 and the two writers started meeting regularly, Mansfield was already ill, though unaware she had tuberculosis until 1918. As a result of her illness, she was hardly ever in London after 1918, and inevitably links and friendships dwindled as her health deteriorated and her search for a cure became ever more desperate. However, some early friendships and connections would prove important, not just to the individuals involved, but, more importantly, to twentieth-century literary history, as I shall demonstrate.