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Katherine Mansfield is perhaps New Zealand’s most famous literary figure. Her New Zealand childhood heavily influenced many of her stories, including “The Garden Party.”
At the time of Mansfield’s birth in 1888, New Zealand was a relatively young country, especially when compared to England, where Mansfield attended school from 1903–06. The first European settlers arrived there in 1815; the first to settle Wellington came in 1840. New Zealand became a self-governing colony in 1841. Her country and her city were both less than 50 years old at her birth.
New Zealand was also a small country, and Mansfield’s hometown of Wellington was a small city. At the 1891 census, three years after Mansfield’s birth, there were only about 670,000 people in the entire country with a meager 33,000 living in and around Wellington. But the city was rapidly growing. By 1906, the year Mansfield returned from London, the population had nearly doubled, to about 64,000. Still, it was a very small city when compared to London, which held nearly 6.5 million people in 1900. During Mansfield's time, the vast majority of Wellington's residents identified themselves as British, and the native Maori population in the city was virtually nonexistent.
Mansfield’s native country is also quite remote. It is almost 1,400 miles from Wellington to Sydney, Australia. The distance between Wellington and London is about 12,000 miles sailing west or 13,000 miles eastward. When Mansfield traveled to London in 1903, the trip took 42 days or seven weeks. Wellington and London are almost literally a world apart.
Since her parents both immigrated to New Zealand from Australia, Mansfield was a first-generation New Zealander. Although she might have thought of herself as a member of the British Empire, many people in England would have viewed Mansfield as a colonist, an outsider. She would have even been looked down on for it. She would have likely also been prejudged as provincial and unsophisticated.
Mansfield had complex feelings toward her New Zealand home. While she wrote that “New Zealand is in my very bones,” she also bristled at the rigid conventions of Wellington society. Mansfield occupied a unique cultural space between England and New Zealand. As a New Zealander, she provided an outsider’s perspective of England. As an expatriate, she was able to view New Zealand from a distance of both time and space. And yet it was her keen explorations and insights on the human soul, mind, and spirit that garnered her the international appeal she evokes still today.
