Even though Katherine Mansfield wrote ‘I live to write’, it sometimes seems as though she lived to die rather than write, as if readers find her work shadowed by her own mortality well before she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Similarly, undergraduates writing essays on the poetry of Sylvia Plath find omens of suicide even in celebratory poems about her children. More than most early twentieth-century writers, Mansfield's work is discussed within biographical parameters, so that the eponymous man without a temperament in that story is identified with Murry and his wife with Mansfield, living as she had to in a Mediterranean climate to avoid a British winter. Though Mansfield's letters and diaries trace her gallant, protracted struggle with disease, my focus will be on her fiction, investigating in this essay forms of contagion that emerge as a theme very early in her stories, long before she became ill, as she explored the Empire city of her birth and then its matrix on the other side of the world.

In a vignette called ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ published in November 1907 in the Australian Native Companion, Mansfield, aged nineteen, compares what she calls ‘the orthodox banality of carpet bedding’ near the entrance to the gardens in Wellington with the bush higher up the hill; there she sees ‘a great company moving towards me, their faces averted, wreathed with green garlands, passing, passing’. While the children in the carpet garden appear ‘meaningless’, the vague funereal forms, passing in every sense, wreathed and lurking in the shadow, seem to see the visitor as ‘the thief of their birthright’. The narrator is filled with guilt, and compares cultural aspiration with racial lamentation to evoke antithetical identities. Pākehā people look ‘reverently, admiringly, at the carpet bedding, spelling aloud the Latin names of the flowers’, whereas the passing of the spectral Māori ‘is like the sound of weeping’. The piece hints at the histrionic influence of decadent writers such as Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson whose work the young Mansfield admired, but it also shows political awareness.