Katherine Mansfield

family, she was also a first cousin of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, a distinguished novelist in her time. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, went on to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. In 1893, the Mansfield family moved to Karori, a suburb of Wellington, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood; she later used her memories of this time as an inspiration for her story Prelude . Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls' High School Magazine in 1898 and 1899. In 1902, she developed strong feelings for a musician who played the cello, Arnold Trowell, although her feelings were not, for the most part, returned. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell's father. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling isolated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general, of her interest in the Maori people (New Zealand's native people), who were often portrayed in a sympathetic light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped .