Katherine Mansfield in Picton
When I began my research I lived in Wellington in Days Bay, across the road from the house the young Katherine Mansfield came to for holidays.
I watched ocean liners and interisland ferries as they headed out to or arrived from Cook Strait, and I often travelled to Picton myself for holidays. In my childhood our family regularly passed through Picton to visit my grandparents who farmed in Canterbury, and later took the ferry to Picton for South Island skiing and tramping holidays.
In 1990 I moved to Picton. There I began reading The letters of Katherine Mansfield and was intrigued by the many references to localities in Picton and the Marlborough Sounds such as Kenepuru and Pelorus Sound. Books about Marlborough also mentioned her Beauchamp grandparents who were early settlers in Picton and Anakiwa (where the Outward Bound School is located). I was fortunate to find many historical images both in the Picton Museum and the Alexander Turnbull Library collections. These were my inspiration to continue writing. I kept them all together in a clearfile with captions and had several heritage postcards above my writing desk.
With the help of my publisher who said ‘weave it all together’ I wrote the book showing Katherine Mansfield’s fascination with travel, her contribution to literature, and the part that Picton, Anakiwa and the Marlborough Sounds played in her life and her writing.
Julie Kennedy
I watched ocean liners and interisland ferries as they headed out to or arrived from Cook Strait, and I often travelled to Picton myself for holidays. In my childhood our family regularly passed through Picton to visit my grandparents who farmed in Canterbury, and later took the ferry to Picton for South Island skiing and tramping holidays.
In 1990 I moved to Picton. There I began reading The letters of Katherine Mansfield and was intrigued by the many references to localities in Picton and the Marlborough Sounds such as Kenepuru and Pelorus Sound. Books about Marlborough also mentioned her Beauchamp grandparents who were early settlers in Picton and Anakiwa (where the Outward Bound School is located). I was fortunate to find many historical images both in the Picton Museum and the Alexander Turnbull Library collections. These were my inspiration to continue writing. I kept them all together in a clearfile with captions and had several heritage postcards above my writing desk.
With the help of my publisher who said ‘weave it all together’ I wrote the book showing Katherine Mansfield’s fascination with travel, her contribution to literature, and the part that Picton, Anakiwa and the Marlborough Sounds played in her life and her writing.
Julie Kennedy
"The book is beautifully and generously illustrated and draws attention to the undoubted effect these places and experiences had on the young girl who would grow up to become New Zealand’s most famous writer." Historic Places Book Review (excerpt)
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Katherine Mansfield, at 19 and 'bored with Wellington', left New Zealand to be a writer. She never returned. Shortly before her death at 34 in 1923, she wrote (in a story fragment): 'It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty.' The setting, though unnamed, is almost certainly the Marlborough Sounds. Katherine Mansfield first made the Wellington-Picton crossing to the Marlborough Sounds when she was six months old. The area helped form her, and its images appeared in her letters and stories throughout her life. Her story The Voyage is included here. Previously unpublished material appears in Katherine Mansfield in Picton. It quotes extensively from Mansfield and her relatives, and traces the links she and her family had with the Sounds. Featured family are her grandparents, Arthur and Mary Beauchamp, one-time residents of Picton, and her great uncle Cradock Beauchamp, who farmed the land at the head of Queen Charlotte Sound where the Cobham Outward Bound School now stands. Katherine Mansfield remains New Zeland's best known writer internationally |
