Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

So Katherine Mansfield, aged twenty-one and happy to have escaped to Europe, described herself. Several years later and nearing the end of her short life, she wrote, ‘The longer I live the more I turn to New Zealand. I thank God I was born in New Zealand. A young country is a real heritage, though it takes one time to recognise it. But New Zealand is in my very bones.’⁵⁹

From the other side of the world,

From a little island cradled in the giant sea bosom,

From a little land with no history,

(Making its own history, slowly and clumsily

Piecing together this and that, finding the pattern, solving the problem,

Like a child with a box of bricks),

I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood,

Full of a youthful strength that wars with itself and is lawless ….⁵⁸