She's one of New Zealand's greatest writers - yet at the end of her life, Katherine Mansfield was buried in a pauper's grave in France.
Her remains were reinterred six years later in a tomb that for years simply described her as the 'wife of John Middleton Murry' - but it's possible the remains are not actually hers.
It was a site historian Redmer Yska visited as part of his traverse of Europe in pursuit of the places Mansfield stayed in the final years before she finally succumbed in at age 34 to the tuberculosis that plagued her.
His investigation of her post-war life in France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland found a number of European devotees determined to preserve her legacy.
It also uncovered how learning to shoot a gun helped make her feel like a "new being", as she coped with a depression - and sometimes fury - brought on by an increasingly debilitating disease.
The medicine she was taking up to six times a day contained a powerful opiate to which she became addicted - yet it's at this point she was penning some of her best work.
The details are all in Redmer's new book Katherine Mansfield's Europe: Station to Station, which he'll be talking about at this year's Auckland Writers' Festival.
Photo: Supplied
