After her education (in Wellington and London), Katherine Mansfield left New Zealand at the age of 19 to establish herself in England as a writer. Her initial disillusion appears in the ill-humoured stories collected in In a German Pension (1911). Until 1914 she published stories in Rhythm and The Blue Review, edited by the critic and essayist John Middleton Murry, whom she married in 1918 after her divorce from George Bowden. The death of her soldier brother in 1915 shocked her into a recognition that she owed what she termed a sacred debt to him and to the remembered places of her native country. Prelude (1918) was a series of short stories beautifully evocative of her family memories of New Zealand. These, with others, were collected in Bliss (1920), which secured her reputation and is typical of her art.

In the next two years Mansfield did her best work, achieving the height of her powers in The Garden Party (1922), which includes “At the Bay,” “The Voyage,” “The Stranger” (with New Zealand settings), and the classic “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” a subtle account of genteel frustration. The last five years of her life were shadowed by tuberculosis. Her final work (apart from unfinished material) was published posthumously in The Dove's Nest (1923) and Something Childish (1924).

From her papers, Murry edited the Journal (1927, rev. ed. 1954), and he also published with annotations her letters to him (1928, rev. ed. 1951). Her collected letters were edited by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott (1984–2008); Scott also edited Mansfield's notebooks (1997).