»A Cup of Tea« is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, first published in 1922. KATHERINE MANSFIELD, actually Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (later Murry), was born in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, and died in 1923 as a result of her pulmonary tuberculosis at a hospital near Fontainebleau, France. Mansfield left her homeland at the age of 19 and moved to Europe. In London, she established herself as a writer and became friends with Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Rumour has it that the latter infected her with the lung disease that became her demise, at the young age of 35.