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Monday, July 23, 2012

Katherine Mansfield stories found


Four previously unknown stories by New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield have been found by a London student.

The stories, dating from 1908 and 1909, were discovered in London's King's College archives by PhD student Chris Mourant.

The find is particularly exciting because it includes a short story, A Little Episode, which recounts one of the most painful chapter's of Mansfield's life, the UK's Independent reports.

Written in 1909, the story mirrors Mansfield's own affairs with Garnet Trowell, a musician who got her pregnant and then rejected her, and George Bowden, a singing teacher whom she wed out of convenience and then rejected on their wedding night.

Mansfield also lost the baby.

Little is known about this period of Mansfield's life because she destroyed all her personal papers from that year.

The other three stories are children's fairy tales.

The stories are set to be included as an appendix in the first complete edition of Mansfield's fiction, to be published by the University of Edinburgh.


Mansfield was born in Wellington in 1888. She left New Zealand in 1908, bound for London. She died of tuberculosis in France in 1923, at the age of 34.

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