She's the author of short story collections such as Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party, and Other Stories (1922); and she is known as one of the originators of the modern short story in English. Her father was an incredibly successful businessman in the growing economy of New Zealand, and he sent her away to school in England. After her eighteenth birthday, when her parents came to pick her up from her English school and bring her back to New Zealand, she found that she no longer had anything in common with them or their values. She wrote in her journal on the boat ride home, "They are worse than I had even expected. They are prying and curious, they are watchful and they discuss only the food . . . . For more than a quarter of an hour they are quite unbearable, and so absolutely my mental inferiors."
As soon as she got back to New Zealand, she became one of the wildest members of the small artistic community there. She had affairs with men and women; she traveled deep into the countryside and lived with the indigenous people; and she published a series of occasionally scandalous stories under a variety of pseudonyms. In a letter to an editor, asking for money, she wrote, "[I have] a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse." Eventually, her parents gave her an allowance so she could move to London, and she never returned to New Zealand.
Mansfield lived so freely in the London bohemian scene that she eventually had to destroy her own diaries for fear of incriminating evidence. At one point, she married a man she barely knew, but left him before the wedding night was over, because she couldn't stand the pink bedspread and the lampshade with pink tassels in the hotel room. She had to settle down a bit when her mother came to London and threatened to put her in a convent. She said, "How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"
She wrote sketches and essays for various newspapers and journals, but she didn't begin to write the stories that made her famous until her younger brother came to visit her in 1915. They had long talks over the course of the summer, reminiscing about growing up in New Zealand. She hadn't seen him in years and found that she had more in common with him than any other member of the family. He left that fall to start military duty as a soldier in World War I. She learned two months later that he had been killed while demonstrating how to throw a grenade. She was devastated, and she dealt with her grief by writing a series of short stories about her childhood, including "The Garden Party" which many consider her masterpiece. Mansfield was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf, who served for a time as her editor and publisher and famously said of her, "She is the only writer I have ever been jealous of."
She died of tuberculosis a few years later in January 1923, at the age of 34. She wrote, "How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - little rags and shreds of your very life."
~The Writer's Almanac
