The growing avant-garde of the second and third decades of the twentieth century admired her unique insight. Virginia Woolf--who alternately disapproved of and envied Mansfield's wider and more amorphous sexual, economic, and social experience and who was both her principal rival and close friend in a shifting, difficult, intense, and communicative relationship--always respected and learned from Mansfield's writing. When she heard that Mansfield had died, Woolf wrote in her diary: "I was jealous of her writing--the only writing I have ever been jealous of." Mansfield's fiction has been increasingly respected throughout the years, the quality of her thought and writing praised as further stories, journals, scrapbooks, and letters have been posthumously published. Although reminiscences, particularly those of John Middleton Murry, the husband who survived her, have sometimes tended to sanctify her, healthy reactions against sanctity have questioned the reputations of Murry and others; they have questioned not at all Mansfield's fiction or her role as a significant and seminal modernist. The variety and brevity of the fiction, its accessibility as well as its length, have enabled Mansfield to reach an expanding audience throughout the century.
Mansfield was born as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in Wellington, New Zealand, on 14 October 1888, the third daughter in a commercially and socially expansive family.
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