Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Brigid Brophy, Christopher Isherwood – these are just some of the mid-century writers who claimed and acclaimed her work; she seems even to have been the source for Isherwood’s famous phrase, ‘I am a camera,’ and Carson McCullers reputedly read the collection of Mansfield’s stories in her local library in Columbus, Georgia, until the pages fell out and they had to order a new one.

So many different lives and afterlives for such a short life. The afterlives began immediately after her death with the ghostly sentimentalised version of Mansfield confected by her husband, the critic John Middleton Murry, when he began publishing not just posthumous stories, reviews and fiction fragments but her private writings edited by him. According to the different claims of her various biographers and critics since then, she’s been a sweet and wholesome tragic victim, a selfish dark-eyed piece of trouble, a feminist, an anti-feminist, a satirist, a sentimentalist, a miniaturist, an overinflated reputation, a repressed lesbian, a colonial bisexual angel-devil plagiarist original.

Mansfield was herself merrily dextrous when it came to identity, very much ‘in the habit of running up spare personalities for herself’. 5 She regularly used a whole salon of invented pseudonymns, male and female, in her letters and early published pieces (and enjoyed the game of giving different names to those close to her too). She changed her name as if changing her air. She had had a talent for mimicry since childhood and was clearly a gifted social and literary chameleon. If writers who were unlikely bedfellows claimed her while she was alive, if somehow she managed to have intense close friendships with Lawrence and his wife as well as with their opposite literary camp, the ‘Woolves’ and the ‘Blooms Berries’, as she herself called them, then she straddled these camps just like her work straddles the opposite literary modes of decadence and modernism, symbolism and realism, readable as both high aestheticism and utilitarian politics at once.

When it comes to the writers who claim her in the later twentieth century, you couldn’t get more polar-opposite a pair of admirers than Philip Larkin, who saw himself in her (‘I share a hell of a lot of common characteristics with her … I feel very close to her in some things’) 6, and Angela Carter, herself doubtless drawn to Mansfield’s anatomising of love, her tendency to see it as sheer theatre. 7

The young Larkin loved her for her ‘courage’. Carter, like many women writers of the second half of the century, loved this too, and recognized a radical violence, something ‘formidable’ in this slight-seeming, short-lived writer whose trademark, a form so easily dismissed, the short story, becomes in her hands something new-made, full of unsettling potential, a force couched in a tiny space where voice can simultaneously, almost effortlessly, combine concepts as destabilising to each other as naivety and knowledge, and where form simultaneously mimics and questions the conventional shape of narrative. The multi-vocality of the stories, and the rock-steady discipline in the making of them, are striking. Their performance of bright fragility glows with power like a lightbulb about to blow. Their viscerality still comes as a shock.

These near-plotless pieces of glinting brilliance, with the hint in them of light, energy, shattered glass, were written by someone who died so young that her achievements in the short time she lived are remarkable.

Katherine Beauchamp was born on 14 October 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, into a well-to-do family, the third child of five; her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a respectable merchant banker later knighted for services to his country. She grew up in the small village of Karori just outside Wellington; her mother thought her third daughter, who wore glasses and had a stutter and seemed rather intense, a bit too overweight. Her teachers remembered her as ‘a surly sort of a girl … imaginative to the point of untruth.’ But if ‘the family was very conventional; Kass was the outlaw’. 8 By the time she was fourteen and she and her elder sisters had been sent across the sea to London for an education at Queen’s College, a liberal girls’ school in Harley Street, the family outlaw had found her forte, or one of them: ‘I could make the girls cry when I read Dickens in the sewing class’. 9

It was at Queen’s that she met Ida Baker, who would become her faithful, beloved and abused, lifelong friend and companion, one of the few consistently supportive elements in this short, fragmented life. It was also at Queen’s that she first realized how hard it might be to be accepted as anything other than a provincial outsider in English society. One day, characteristically, she spent a lesson studying not the Bible, as she should have been, but the veins in the face of the elderly Headmaster: ‘they told us he was a learned man, but I could not help seeing him in a double-breasted frock coat, a large pseudo-clerical pith helmet … pointing out with an umbrella a probable site of a probable encampment of some wandering tribe.’ He asked the class if any young lady present had ever been chased by a wild bull. She raised her hand because ‘nobody else did… (though of course I hadn’t). Ah, he said, I am afraid you do not count. You are a little savage from New Zealand’. 10

London and travelling gave her all sorts of potential selves. Her early letters are a delight; they reveal her spirit, her charm, her vibrancy. ‘Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people’ she wrote to her cousin. 11 But in 1906 her parents shipped her back to Wellington where, in a fit of detestation of her family’s, the town’s, the very country’s conventional small mindedness, she wandered about being ‘ultra modern’, wearing brown to match her cello, throwing herself into a series of flirtations and affairs with both women and men, and writing and publishing daringly decadent vignettes in a local paper. She steeped herself in the heady art of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, the writings of Pater and Wilde, revering the latter for his piercing wit, his bathos, his lawless sensuality. ‘O Oscar! Am I peculiarly susceptible to sexual impulse?’. 12 In her notebooks she wrote aphorisms to match Wilde’s own. ‘To break a law with success is to be illustrious.’ ‘To have the courage of your excess – to find the limit of yourself!’ 13 She imbibed what Zeitgeist there was, zigzagged from the excitements of the Graphophone to the latest Biograph show, and decided that since she’d been forbidden a life as a professional cellist by her father she’d be a writer instead.

Here she is, writing to the editor of the paper which published her first short pieces in 1907: ‘some details as to myself. I am poor – obscure – just eighteen years of age – with a rapacious appetite for everything, and principles as light as my purse’.