“A wet and windy village full of rheumatism and beauty,” said Enid Bagnold, of coastal Rottingdean in Sussex. Since the 1900s, when there were twice as many sheep as residents, various artists and writers have lived there. Kipling lasted five years (but wintered abroad), finally driven away in 1902 by his widowed aunt Lady Burne-Jones’s antics. Not only did she foment the parish council but she also displayed a pro-Boer banner despite her nephew Stanley Baldwin’s marrying into a village family. By 1909 William Nicholson frequently visited and the once-popular, potential Laureate William Watson lived on the coast road.

None noticed 21-year-old, rheumatism-stricken Kathleen Bowden’s arrival in March 1910 to stay above a grocer’s. By August, Rottingdean had turned her into Katherine Mansfield.

Born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, daughter of the Bank of New Zealand’s chairman, she studied in London from 1903 to 1905. Come 1908, set on writing and steeped in Wilde, she returned, with cello, from New Zealand after various lesbian affairs — and mistakenly feared pregnancy en route.

Despite soon finding passion for the musician Garnet Trowell, with whose twin brother she had a near-romance, she suddenly married the singer George Bowden in 1909 after three weeks’ acquaintance. The bride wore black — and immediately vanished, joining Trowell and a touring opera with which she sang. Duly pregnant, she miscarried in Bavaria, where her visiting mother had left her.

Early in 1910 Kathleen returned briefly to Bowden, who encouraged her stories about Bavarian pension life. Soon very ill, she went with college friend Ida Baker to Rottingdean, near a White Horse Inn and Pier both since demolished. Notebook and letters also do not survive, but in 1971 Ida splendidly recalled that last Edwardian summer. (Alas, Brighton’s new library, widely criticised for scant shelving, keeps her book unbrowsably in store.) Even then Ida obscured as “rheumatism” a gonorrhea undiagnosed until 1918.

Kathleen was particularly ill while the King died in May. Then came a cottage by a meadow “full of flowering grasses and large white daisies. We took in a small stray dog which she loved.”

While Kathleen craved library books, “the sun shone and the sea breezes filled the house. She had not been able to sit on the shore and listen to the sea since she left Day’s Bay in New Zealand.” They illicitly explored another, perilously cliff-edge house which “was breathing its doom and every now and again it shivered with the thunder of the waves breaking far below”. Above their cottage, some lightning made Kathleen faint for ten minutes. Energies regained, and now calling herself Katherine Mansfield, she began to draw upon New Zealand memories.

A century later residents of Rottingdean are petitioning to commemorate this crucial sojourn. The only recorded grocer, Mrs Tickner’s premises, await the 1911 census’s full details, and if the cottage remains elusive, the sheep-filled opening of At the Bay could be as much Rottingdean as the Antipodes, where “the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one’s eyes ache to look at it”. With the local authority falling short of national guidelines for library hours, her spirit would eschew a plaque and prefer Rottingdean library to open more than three days a week.