The Mansfield Industry continues to proliferate. Frances Wilson, in a recent NYRB review of Claire Harman’s All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything (from which the following information was largely gathered), wrote .
A century after the writer's death, a new biography shows how she withstood colonial prejudice and terminal illness to produce revolutionary short fiction.
by Christine Dann
If you had been given permission to explore Wellington’s Parliamentary Library on a weekday afternoon in 1907, you might have been very surprised to see – among the staff and other users in jackets and ties – a teenage girl settled comfortably in a corner, with a stack of books close to hand. If you came at closing time, you might even have overheard her father (a friend of the Chief Librarian, as well as Premier Richard John Seddon) say “Come on, Kathleen, it’s time to go home now.”
It was only because her father (the wealthy businessman Harold Beauchamp) was so well-connected that Kathleen had access to the library, but no one could complain that she did not make made good use of her precious after-school time there. According to the Parliamentary webpage on her activities there: