凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德/Katherine Mansfield
凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德（1888—1923），生于新西兰威灵顿，本名卡瑟琳·包姗普。1914年，她的小说集《节奏》和《忧郁评论》在她的第一位房客、后来成为她丈夫的社会学家和前文学评论家米多尔顿·莫里的协助下编辑出版，后创作了著名小说《序曲》和《园会》。1923年1月9日，常年罹患肺结核的凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德逝世，年仅45岁。在凯瑟琳的世界里，死亡是静穆和安逸，甚至是美丽的。看，她临终前的最后的一句话是：“我喜爱雨，我想要感到它们落到脸上的感觉。”
... You see that big nail to the right of the front door? I can scarcely look at it even now and yet I could not bear to take it out. I should like to think it was there always even after my time. I sometimes hear the next people saying, "There must have been a cage hanging from there." And it comforts me. I feel he is not quite forgotten.
... You cannot imagine how wonderfully he sang. It was not like the singing of other canaries. And that isn't just my fancy. Often, from the window I used to see people stop at the gate to listen, or they would lean over the fence by the mock-orange for quite a long time—carried away. I suppose it sounds absurd to you—it wouldn't if you had heard him—but it really seemed to me he sang whole songs, with a beginning and an end to them.
For instance, when I finished the house in the afternoon, and changed my blouse and brought my sewing on the verandah here, he used to hop, hop, hop from one perch to the other, tap against the bars as if to attract my attention, sip a little water, just as a professional singer might, and then break into a song so exquisite that I had to put my needle down to listen to him. I can't describe it; I wish I could. But it was always the same, every afternoon, and I felt that I understood every note of it.