Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888–1923) adopted the name of Katherine Mansfield when she began to publish her fiction in 1907.  One of the first to benefit when British institutions of higher education opened to women, she attended Queen’s College in London. The Wellington of her childhood appears as a setting in many of her stories although she returned to her colonial homeland for only two years after leaving Queen’s.  Mansfield described herself as “a writer first and a woman after.”