Katherine Mansfield House

Katherine Mansfield was born in this house in 1888 and lived here until she was five - a short period that supplied the settings for several of her best-known stories, including Prelude and A Birthday. She left New Zealand at nineteen, spent the rest of her life in Europe, largely in England and France, wrote the short fiction that made her one of the significant modernists of her generation, and died of tuberculosis in 1923 at thirty-four. The house was saved from demolition in the 1980s and restored, and the restoration is unusual in method: because the family's own records were thin, the interiors were reconstructed substantially from Mansfield's descriptions in the stories, using her fiction as documentary evidence about a real house. Whether that is scholarship or circularity is an interesting question the museum does not hide. There is a small garden and an exhibition on her life and work.

History

The house was built in 1888 for Mansfield's father, Harold Beauchamp, and she was born there on 14 October that year; the family moved to Karori in 1893. She drew on it in Prelude, A Birthday, The Doll's House and The Wind Blows, and from 1921 to 1924 it was the home of Dr Frederick Truby King, founder of the Plunket Society (Wikipedia, Katherine Mansfield House and Garden).

What to look for

• The birthplace rooms - restored to the 1888-93 period.
• The fiction as evidence - interiors reconstructed from her own stories.
• The exhibition - her life, her leaving and the European years.
• The garden - small, behind the house on Tinakori Road.

When to go

Any season - indoors. Opening days are limited, generally closed on Mondays; check before walking up. Ticketed.

Good to know

It is a small house and a short visit. Mansfield lived here only until she was five, so the connection is to her childhood and her fiction rather than to her working life. The restoration is partly inferred from the stories themselves.

Nearby

Thorndon and the Botanic Garden are close; the parliamentary buildings are a short walk.

Key facts