14 Of course, she wasn’t poor at all, but who could resist the rhyme in poor and obscure? Not Mansfield, the happy self-mythologiser, whose rhetorical free-spiritedness here is daring enough for its time and place and whose actual free-spiritedness was about to cause her a great deal of very real trouble.

‘Here, then,’ she jotted in a notebook, ‘is a little summary of what I need – power, wealth, and freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women from generation to generation which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of that bogey’. 15 An early proto-realism and proto-feminism unite in this, to spar with her equally deeply felt aestheticism. Things were changing for women in the first decade of the century; partly she speaks here with the voice her time allowed but partly with a spirit characteristically at once disciplined and off the rein. She notes in a story written when she was back in London just a year later, ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’ – a tale which takes advertising language and escapist fiction equally to task – that fantasy is destructive and exhausting. Fiction, Mansfield implies, should be more answerable to the real concerns of women trying to make their way in a world when power, wealth and freedom may well circumstantially evade them.

That said, Mansfield, with all the witty callowness of her youthful individualism, found Suffrage itself unpalatable, laughable, a bit too earnest for her, and in 1908, back in London, escaped with great relief a Suffrage meeting with its ‘women who looked like very badly upholstered chairs’, declaring that ‘the world was too full of laughter’ for her to become a Suffrage volunteer. 16

But until 1908 she was still trapped with her family in New Zealand, where she enjoyed a few romantic fantasies herself, first with a young female artist (‘I snap my fingers at Fate. I will not dance to the Music of the Marionettes’), then with a passing male musician, ‘lover of a thousand actresses, roamer of every city under the sun’. 17 Perhaps exhausted by her ‘rapacious appetite’, her father gave in, gave her an allowance and let her return to ‘the wizard London’ where she could be a New Woman not quite so close to home.

She was about to learn the lessons of her own limits – via the courage, and the misfortune, of her excess. In London she fell deeply in love with a fellow New Zealander, a singer, the young son of family friends. This family threw her out when she made it clear to them they were lovers. She was pregnant. Presumably to make her unborn child legal, and to emerge with the necessary respectability intact, Mansfield did something which would soon become a central part of the legend of her unscrupulous survivalism. She married George Bowden, a music scholar eleven years her senior who was enamoured of her, then left him for good the next morning, having spent the wedding day having dinner, visiting the theatre, then simply refusing to consummate the marriage that night at their hotel.

Her mother arrived from New Zealand and swept her off to Germany, signing her into a convent in a small spa town in Bavaria. Shortly after this, Mrs Beauchamp left her there, returned home to Wellington and on arrival cut her outlaw daughter out of her will for good. Mansfield got herself a room in a local German pension and, some months later, miscarried there alone. She began an affair with a Polish translator living in the same town, who introduced her to the stories of Chekhov (and gave her a bad case of gonorrhoea which would go undiagnosed for years and profoundly physically weaken her). When she returned to London she published some short stories about her time in Germany in her new friend A. R. Orage’s periodical, The New Age. These formed the basis of her first collection, In A German Pension, published in 1911. That same year she met John Middleton Murry, an Oxford undergraduate and the editor of a little magazine called Rhythm. He commissioned some stories from her then moved into her flat, first as her lodger, then, on her invitation, her lover.

Mansfield would spend the rest of her life with Middleton Murry on one arm, as it were, and her schoolfriend Ida Baker on the other. Murry eventually became her husband, in a marriage which she often defined, in her notebooks and letters, as a kind of childish, innocent, near-sexless Eden. Baker she repeatedly called, with a mixture of affection and disdain, her ‘wife’. (In fact she always kept Ida very close to her, maybe partly to be able to dismiss, or control, as she pleased, her own bisexual urge). The adventurer had her last daring sexual escapade in 1915, smuggling herself across First World War checkpoints near the French military front to meet a soldier-lover there.

But 1915 was also the year in which her much-loved younger brother, Leslie Beauchamp, met his accidental death at the age of twenty, ‘blown to bits’ while training soldiers how to use hand grenades in a French wood. From this point on, something sobered in Mansfield. She settled to her first real work, a long story called ‘The Aloe’, based in the New Zealand of their childhood and dedicated to Leslie.