Focusing on the first nineteen years of Katherine Mansfield’s life, from her birth in 1888 to her arrival in London in 1908 to be a writer, this new biography sheds new light on Mansfield’s childhood and teenage years as well as on her development as a writer. The biography draws extensively on previously unused archive material, including the research papers assembled by Ruth Elvish Mantz for her 1933 biography of Mansfield, detailed reminiscences of former school friends and acquaintances, Mansfield’s autograph book, birthday book, her early letters, notebooks and family papers. Using this rich seam of material, Gerri Kimber explores Mansfield’s home life and school days, her friendships, first infatuations and sexual experimentation both with young men and young women and her travels through the volcanic North Island of New Zealand and examines her earliest published stories which appeared in school magazines. What emerges is a picture of a feisty, mischievous, young girl and an expressive, non-conformist teenager: the unruly Kass Beauchamp who became Katherine Mansfield, the famous modernist writer.

"The details and research covered by Gerri, make the character of Katherine come alive. Just reading the many snippets that are contained in this book will certainly promote an interest in Katherine Mansfield, and place her name among those great writers in history." - Blue Wolf Reviews

"This is surely a book of which Mansfield would have approved...her meticulous work navigates easily between the macro- and microscopic." - New Zealand Studies Network

"[A] shrewdly sympathetic account of Mansfield’s early years.[A] sensitive portrait of a vital, contrary young woman, still locked in a love-hate relationship with the country and family which she would come to celebrate in fiction." - Times Literary Supplement