Focusing on the first 20 years of Katherine Mansfield’s life, from her birth in 1888 to her final departure from New Zealand in 1908, this biography reveals the importance of Mansfield’s childhood and teenage years to her development as a writer and offers unique insights into her New Zealand stories.

Gerri Kimber draws on detailed reminiscences of Mansfield’s former school friends and acquaintances, early letters, personal papers, notebooks and family papers as well as on previously unused archive material and photographs. Kimber illuminates Mansfield’s home life and school days, her friendships, first infatuations and sexual experimentation both with young men and young women and reveals the effect Mansfield’s experiences had on her earliest stories. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a feisty and imaginative young girl who would turn into an expressive, non-conformist adolescent: the unruly Kass Beauchamp who would become Katherine Mansfield, the celebrated modernist writer.