The Absence at the Heart of Home

In December 1908 Katherine Mansfield noted: ‘I should like to write a life much in the style of Walter Pater's “Child in the House”. About a girl in Wellington.’ This project started to materialise in March 1915, when she began a novel called Karori, which was however abandoned. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp's visit to London in August 1915 triggered further memories and these took shape in ‘The Wind Blows’ (1920), a first version of which was published as ‘Autumns: II’ in Signature on 4 October 1915, three days before Leslie died while training for war.

Mansfield's bereavement prompted an identification with Leslie that not only translated into the need to share her living experiences with her dead brother (‘I never see anything that I like, or hear anything, without the longing that he should see and hear, too’), but which also entailed a reversal of her expectations and authorial stance:

This emotional crisis proved conducive to a new source of inspiration, which Mansfield perceived as contrasting with her previous creative concerns as she noted in January 1916:

The result of this aesthetic shift was Mansfield's momentous decision to write recollections of her ‘undiscovered country’, making New Zealand ‘leap into the eyes of the old world […] with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an after glow because you, my little sun of it, are set’.