Kathleen Mansfield Murry (nee Beauchamp, 1888-1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer and poet who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name Katherine Mansfield. Aged 19, she first visited England where she eventually settled, falling into a bohemian way of life and becoming friends with writers such as D H Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. She also travelled in continental Europe and her experiences in Germany inspired her first published collection of stories, In a German Pension (1911). In that year she entered into a relationship with John Middleton Murry, a writer and magazine editor, and the couple eventually married in 1918 although they often lived apart. In late 1917 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and she became a prolific writer in the last years of her life, publishing two further story collections in 1920 and 1922, with much of her work remaining unpublished at the time of her death in 1923. This collection of her poems was published posthumously that year with a brief introductory note by Murry.