Mansfield and Murry: Two Children Holding Hands

Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry had an unorthodox partnership; they were lovers for seven years and then husband and wife for five before Mansfield’s premature death in 1923. After the ‘beatitude of first love’, there were periods of cohabitation and estrangement with infidelities on both sides. Mansfield’s declining health and inability to conceive a child adversely affected their relationship, but there was a fundamental incompatibility from their first meeting. Mansfield looked for practical and emotional support from Murry, which he was unable to give, and he often felt himself to be ‘Katherine’s inferior’. One of the most crucial aspects of their relationship was the working, literary partnership of editor and author; ‘we are – apart from everything else – each other’s critic’, wrote Mansfield. But on a personal level they were, in her words, ‘children to each other’, sharing a childlike love that never matured. It was a view that Murry also held, describing them at one point as ‘dream-children’. Using Mansfield and Murry’s letters and journals, including unpublished material, this essay considers their relationship on both personal and creative levels, and its influence – both positive and negative – on Mansfield’s writing.