literatur
Title: An overview of “Miss Brill”
Author(s): Robert Peltier
Source: Short Stories for Students. Detroit: Gale, 2002. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
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[Peltier is an English instructor at Trinity College and has published works of both fiction and nonfiction. In the following essay, he provides a general overview of Mansfield's “Miss Brill.”]
Katherine Mansfield, born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, lived a short life, but she established a literary reputation at a young age. Her first published book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911, when she was only twenty—two years old. She became friends with some of the great literary figures of her day, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and married the writer and critic J. Middleton Murry.
Her stories are full of detail and small, albeit significant, incidents in her characters' lives. In an often-quoted letter published in The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, she says of “Miss Brill“: "I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her, and to fit her on that day at that moment.” Katherine Fullbrook notes in her biography titled simply Katherine Mansfield that “while the surface of her stories often flash with sparkling detail, the underlying tones are sombre, threatening, and register the danger in the most innocent seeming aspects of life.”
“Miss Brill,“ is one of her finest stories, capturing in a moment an event that will forever change the life of the title character. Miss Brill is an older woman of indeterminate age who scrapes by teaching English to school children and reading newspapers to an "old invalid gentleman.” Her joy in life is her visits to the park on Sunday, where she observes all that goes on around her and listens to the conversations of people nearby, as she sits “in other people's lives.” It is when she tries to leave her role as spectator and join the “players” in her
Author(s): Robert Peltier
Source: Short Stories for Students. Detroit: Gale, 2002. From Literature Resource Center.
Document Type: Critical essay
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
[Peltier is an English instructor at Trinity College and has published works of both fiction and nonfiction. In the following essay, he provides a general overview of Mansfield's “Miss Brill.”]
Katherine Mansfield, born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, lived a short life, but she established a literary reputation at a young age. Her first published book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911, when she was only twenty—two years old. She became friends with some of the great literary figures of her day, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and married the writer and critic J. Middleton Murry.
Her stories are full of detail and small, albeit significant, incidents in her characters' lives. In an often-quoted letter published in The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, she says of “Miss Brill“: "I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her, and to fit her on that day at that moment.” Katherine Fullbrook notes in her biography titled simply Katherine Mansfield that “while the surface of her stories often flash with sparkling detail, the underlying tones are sombre, threatening, and register the danger in the most innocent seeming aspects of life.”
“Miss Brill,“ is one of her finest stories, capturing in a moment an event that will forever change the life of the title character. Miss Brill is an older woman of indeterminate age who scrapes by teaching English to school children and reading newspapers to an "old invalid gentleman.” Her joy in life is her visits to the park on Sunday, where she observes all that goes on around her and listens to the conversations of people nearby, as she sits “in other people's lives.” It is when she tries to leave her role as spectator and join the “players” in her