Visitors to New Zealand may notice that the city of Wellington seems to take as much pride in being New Zealand's self-appointed cultural capital as it does in being the actual capital. And one of the city's most prized landmarks is the Katherine Mansfield birthplace. A top tourist attraction, it is undoubtedly one of the most important addresses on the literary map of the country.
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in 1888 in the house at 25 Tinakori Road (then number 11) in the well-heeled suburb of Thorndon. The house had been built that same year for her father, Harold Beauchamp, a prosperous banker. It has now been redecorated in period style, and standing in its dark, cramped rooms, it is not hard to imagine the lives of its first occupants. The house is a fitting symbol of the late-Victorian colonial society into which the writer was born and would later seek to escape, both physically and imaginatively.
At the age of 19, the self-styled Katherine Mansfield left New Zealand, seeking freedom, adventure and a literary career in Europe. In London she met John Middleton Murry, whom she later married, and became close to such luminaries as D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, "the Woolves" and the Bloomsbury set. Developing a distinct modernist voice, she ultimately came to be recognised as one of the world's greatest short story writers.
Chronically ill for most of her adult life, Mansfield spent extended periods in France, Italy and Switzerland. In 1922 she entered Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Avon-Fontainebleau, in France. She died there the following year, at the age of 35. She had never returned to New Zealand; and yet it had exerted a powerful influence on her writing.
Mansfield's early autobiographical stories offer a critique of the class-bound stuffiness of the colonial capital at the turn of the century, with their disarming child's-eye view. Perhaps her most famous story, 'The Doll's House', tells of the Burnell children - based on the Beauchamp family - showing off their new toy to their school-mates. Kezia (Mansfield's own character) attracts the wrath of her aunt when she invites the untouchable Kelvey girls to come and view it: "... where was Mr. Kelvey? Nobody knew for certain. But everybody said he was in prison. So they were the daughters of a washerwoman and a jailbird. Very nice company for other people's children!"
Joyce-like, the exiled writer evoked her childhood home from afar, describing specific locations in precise detail. Close attention has now been paid to these details in the restoration of the Tinakori Road house. Visitors can see, for example, a replica of the famous dolls' house, complete with the little lamp that figures as a central symbol in Mansfield's story. The scullery is even equipped with a lump of gritty yellow soap and a blue bag for laundry - the left-behind rubbish noticed by Kezia in 'Prelude' as, on the day the family moves house, she explores the strangely empty home.
The Beauchamp family did indeed move house - to a larger property in rural Karori. Katherine was just five years old when this happened, and yet she would later recall details about the Tinakori Road house with great accuracy. In fact, so imaginatively drawn was she to the house of her birth that she set two fictionalised accounts of that event there.
Visitors to the house will recognise the claustrophobic diningroom and drawingroom described in 'A Birthday', the story of a difficult labour told through the eyes of a father. Andreas Binzer paces up and down in the diningroom of his storm-shaken house, stopping at one point to pick up a framed photograph of his wife Anna, (based on Katherine's mother, Annie Beauchamp). That photograph is one of many family portraits now on display in the house, including a group shot of the young Beauchamp girls. Katherine is an overweight and rather solemn looking child.
Mansfield imagines her own birth again in 'The Aloe' when she describes the nursery, noting that Kezia had been born in that room: "She had come forth squealing out of a reluctant mother in the teeth of a 'Southerly Buster'. The grandmother, shaking her before the window, had seen the sea rise in green mountains and sweep the esplanade - the little house was like a shell to its loud booming." Again, the writer romantically associates squally weather with the beginning of her own tempestuous life.
Like every other tourist, one of my first impressions of Wellington had indeed been how incredibly blustery it is. But standing looking out of the nursery window of 25 Tinakori Road, I learnt something about artistic licence, as our guide let us into a secret. Meteorological records for the writer's birthday tell of an uncharacteristically calm and sunny day - "but Katherine would have hated that."
25 Tinakori Road, Thorndon, Wellington, New Zealand. Open seven days, 10a.m. - 4p.m. Admission NZ $5.00