Bliss, By Katherine Mansfield is one on the author’s earliest and greatest short stories. It was published in 1918 at a time when its themes of homoerotic longing could only be hinted at in the vaguest of terms. Born Katherine Beauchamp in New Zealand in 1888, At the age of 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in England, where she became a friend of writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917, she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, that claimed her life at age 34.