A researcher into the life of Katherine Mansfield has discovered that New Zealand's most famous writer was actually published seven years earlier than previously thought.
Author Redmer Yska pored over volumes of an early weekly magazine called The New Zealand Graphic from 1900 and found a story called His Little Friend that was published when Ms Mansfield was just 11.
"This is the first known publication of any Katherine Mansfield story," Mr Yska said.
"In it were the seeds of The Garden Party. It's a story about the death of a little boy in the slums right over the road from where Katherine Mansfield lived."
She was previously thought to have first been published in her late teens, by an Australian newspaper in 1907.
Mr Yska describes Katherine Mansfield, who was born in 1888, as proto-feminist, counter-culture hero and a modernist.
"She's the one with that beautiful bob and the far away eyes."
He began writing a book about how fear of disease drove the family out of inner city Thorndon to Karori, and has just published A Strange Beautiful Excitement: Katherine Mansfield's Wellington 1888-1903.
Mr Yska said other biographers have focused on the short story writer's adult life in London.
"They think the story starts when she leaves New Zealand, leaves Wellington. That's when her life starts to matter," he said.
But he wanted to write a different story about a Wellingtonian growing up here.
"I've really tried to bring her back home, show her as a New Zealander, a vigorous youngster walking through the mud of Karori, her hair blowing back in the wind.
"In fact, half of her life is spent here and in a way her most beautiful stories were set here, in a very real sense the place is in her blood, it never really leaves her at all."
Born Kathleen Beauchamp, it was only later she became Katherine Mansfield.
"I think she wanted to dissociate herself from the Beauchamps really, it had a bit more zing to it. She might have done that but she's never stopped writing about her family", Mr Yska said.
He said her notoriety extends well beyond New Zealand. She found fame in England, France, China and America.
"An article in the New York Times book review a few years ago called her the representative woman of the 20th century.
"She was a grafter really, when she's really crook in later life you see her working in bed through the night, just so serious about her work, there's that driven side of her that I really respect.
"After her little brother dies in world war one she makes a commitment to him that she's going to write about their childhood, and that's when she turns back to Wellington and writes luminous stories about her childhood.
"She knew from her mid-twenties she was going to die, she had tuberculosis, she coughed up this bright red blood. She was a goner, so she just gets to work, she doesn't waste a day, I admire that. In some ways that can fasten our mind, what's important to us, make us ask, what are we going to make of our lives? And look what she achieved," he said.
The author hopes the revelation about Katherine Mansfield's earliest story and the publishing of his book will shine a new light on her writing.
Newshub.
