Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, she left for the UK at the age of nineteen and become a significant modernist writer, mixing with fellow writers such as Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot and DH Lawrence. She wrote five collections of short stories, the final one being published posthumously by her husband John Middleton Murry, along with a volume of her poems, another of her critical writings and subsequently collections of her letters and journals. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.