Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace, Wellington
One of the things I always meant to do when we were living in Wellington was visit Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace. A year and a half of residing and working and studying there, and I didn’t make it. However, with a morning spare yesterday, I decided to make the trek across the city to the house at 25 Tinakori Road in Thorndon.
Katherine Mansfield is arguably New Zealand’s most famous short story writer. A young woman who left home for London and to write journals and letters and nearly 100 short stories, to befriend D.H. Lawrence and to be part of the Bloomsbury Group, and to suffer from tuberculous and die in 1923 at the age of 34.
My favourite of her stories have always been the ones from her New Zealand childhood: The Doll’s House, Prelude, At the Bay... These are the stories which we studied at high school, at a time when I was only just starting to discover the magic which words can do. I spent three or four hours wandering the rooms which these stories were set in, and then, in one of the upstairs bedrooms, watching a video about Katherine Mansfield’s life.
Like Mansfield, I can understand the excitement of living in London, amongst it all, but also the need to write about the home-across-the-seas, the memories of the landscape and the weather. And while, I can’t hope to match her cleverness, the strength of her descriptions, and while I perhaps don’t want to match the way she struggled for her art, it was inspiring to wander round those dark rooms with their black and white photos and period furniture. If I want to be a writer, I have to keep writing, here in New Zealand, in London, round everything else, somehow, it has to happen.
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
Katherine Mansfield
