Katherine, Jeanne and Leslie Mansfield

Katherine, Jeanne and Leslie Mansfield

In April 1907, Harold Beauchamp moved his family into 47 Fitzherbert Terrace. Three of his daughters, Vera, Charlotte and Kathleen, had recently returned from school in London. Kathleen, who was to become the writer Katherine Mansfield, was reluctant to leave London, and filled her letters and journals with discontent at life in New Zealand.

This photograph of Mansfield with her younger sister Jeanne and her brother Leslie is thought to have been taken in the garden at 47 Fitzherbert Terrace. During her time in Thorndon several of Mansfield's stories were published in the Australian literary journal, The Native Companion.

In 1908 Harold Beauchamp, by now convinced of his daughter's literary abilities, allowed her to return to London. Mansfield was given a farewell tea by the prime minister's wife, Lady Ward, at Premier House in Tinakori Road. While Mansfield left Thorndon and New Zealand forever that July, in her writing, including the short stories The Garden Party and The Wind Blows, she often drew on the people and places she had known here.

Katherine Mansfield biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

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