Katherine Mansfield, whose collection of stories The Garden Party was published 100 years ago, was a ball of fire who burned through life quickly. She was a lonely person who knew almost everyone: she flirted with Bertrand Russell, lunched with James Joyce, and — her biographer Claire Tomalin says — caught tuberculosis from D.H. Lawrence. Virginia Woolf, for whom she had a brittle admiration that was reciprocated, sent flowers and cigarettes as Mansfield crisscrossed Europe in flight from the disease that would kill her at the age of 34, a year after The Garden Party was published.
Mansfield was, in the words of one critic, “not a nice person”. She was strong-willed and impatient of fools, a category that sometimes included the whole human race. “Saw two of the doctors — an ass and an ass,” she wrote in 1919. Suffragettes were “women who looked like very badly upholstered chairs”. Meanwhile, T.S. Eliot’s work was “unspeakably dreary” and E.M. Forster’s no better: “[He] never gets any further than warming the teapot. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.”
