Katherine Mansfield's identities are bound up with her sense of place and her sense of belonging, national, geographical, cultural, linguistic. But after leaving New Zealand in 1908 Mansfield rarely felt settled and she wrote as a displaced, even, in a certain sense, a homeless person, from a migrant perspective. Hers was what she herself referred to in a letter as a ‘vagrant self’ (CLKM ii. 188). In this chapter we will examine this sense of displacement in Mansfield's writing before going on to discuss the significance of her first home, New Zealand, in and for her writing.

After leaving home and travelling to England for the first time at the age of 14, Mansfield rarely lived in one place for more than a few months at a time, and, despite her efforts to establish a home in England with Murry, for much of her adult life she lived in temporary lodgings, hotels and hostels, guest houses and pensions. Antony Alpers suggests, for example, that at a ‘conservative count’ Mansfield ‘amassed a total of twentynine postal addresses’ between her arrival in London in 1908 and April 1916 (L. 201). The difficulties involved in finding a place to live were no doubt multiple and included the difficulties in her relationship with Murry, her terminal illness, and a chronic lack of money. But the problem also seems to have been to do with a fundamental sense of unease concerning the question of ‘home’, which we might link with Mansfield's complex and indeed multiple national and cultural identities. From November 1915 until her death, Mansfield repeatedly travelled to the Continent, moving from one temporary residence to another on the French or Italian Riviera, in Paris or Switzerland, in search of a climate that would help to cure her tuberculosis, usually returning to London for the summer. Her condition during these years – the years of her major work – was that of the exile, the migrant, the nomad. Her condition was characterized by the loss of place, by ungrounding or displacement – cultural, geographical, linguistic, national. But from early on in her life Mansfield herself recognized that this loss of place, of permanence, was also a gain in that it allowed for a fluidity or mobility of identity.