Above: Katherine Mansfield.
Above: Princess Elizabeth Bibesco.
Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; born October 14, 1888, died January 9, 1923) was a prominent modernist writer who was born and brought up in New Zealand. She wrote short stories and poetry under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, she left colonial New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lady Ottoline Morrell and others in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Mansfield was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1917 and she died in France aged 34.
Katherine and editor John Murry met in 1911 and had a turbulent relationship by anyone's standards: by the time they wed in 1918, they had split several times and seen other people; indeed, the pattern continued through their marriage. Three years after marrying, Mansfield wrote a stern letter to fellow author Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, a woman who for some time had been having an affair with Murry. Mansfield could deal with the infidelity; what she couldn't stand, however, were the love letters.
The letter:
24 March, 1921
Dear Princess Bibesco,
I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world.
You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation.
Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.
Yours sincerely,
Katherine Mansfield
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