The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield

A hundred years ago, in a former Carmelite monastery 60 kilometres south of Paris, Katherine Mansfield ran up a flight of stairs to her bedroom and died of a haemorrhage.  She was 34 years old. She had known for five years that she had tuberculosis. After joining the spiritualist therapeutic community at Fontainebleau-Avon in October 1922, under the guidance of the Russian guru George Gurdjieff, she had been careful to avoid stairs, or only to take them very slowly. But on the 9 January 1923, her husband, the writer and editor John Middleton Murry, came to visit and they enjoyed an evening watching other members of the commune dancing. In a fit of high spirits, or recklessness, forgetful of the painful constraints on her body, Mansfield took off for the last time upstairs and never came down. 

Claire Harman, a distinguished literary biographer, has written a wonderful book to mark the centenary of Mansfield’s death.