Partner Katherine Mansfield
Queer Places:
Wakapuaka Cemetery
Nelson, Nelson City, Nelson, New Zealand
Edith Kathleen "Edie" Bendall
Robison (January 30, 1879 - May 15, 1986) lived most of her life in Wellington.
She has been romantically linked to Katherine
Mansfield. She was an artist/cartoonist in Sydney. When Mansfield was
still in New Zealand, together with Bendall, she had tried to publish a little
illustrated book of children’s verse, but that venture also came to nothing.
She was the daughter of Captain William Bendall and Mary Eliza Taylor. Edith Bendall was nine years older than Katherine Mansfield, and she had a studio a few doors away from her house. To start with, Mansfield made the first move, when she invited Bendall to stay alone with her at their family beach house at Days Bay. She confessed in her journal on June 1, 1907, that she enjoyed the night as she spent it in the arms of Edith and she felt more powerfully all those so-termed sexual impulses with her than with any man. Mansfield's relationship with Bendall upset her parents, but she rebelled against her colonial background and in July 1908, at the age of 19, sailed for London. In 1909 Edith Bendall married George Gerald Stuart Robison, a Wellington College schoolmaster, and died in 1986, at the age of 107. All through her life, she preserved most of the letters she received from Mansfield.
My published books:
