The Circle of Truth: The Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin

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In the following essay, Peterson elucidates the influence of Katherine Mansfield's short stories on Lavin's short fiction.
SOURCE: Peterson, Richard F. “The Circle of Truth: The Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin.” Modern Fiction Studies 24, no. 3 (1978): 383-94.

Katherine Mansfield wrote in her journal that honesty “is the only thing one seems to prize beyond life, love, death, everything. It alone remaineth. O you who come after me, will you believe it? At the end truth is the only thing worth having: it's more thrilling than love, more joyful and more passionate. It simply can not fail.”1 Mary Lavin, one of the short-story writers who came after Katherine Mansfield and became one of her admirers, found a standard for fiction in Mansfield's quest for the truth. In some unpublished and undated notes for an essay on the art of the short story,2 she states her own belief that, in writing, truth is the only thing worth having. Her only qualification of Mansfield's statement is that while truth simply cannot fail, the writer sometimes may fall short or fail in her search for the truth. More specifically, she finds that Katherine Mansfield did capture the truth in “Prelude” and “At the Bay,” but in “Bliss” and “Miss Brill,” stories often praised by critics, the prize eluded her.

Mary Lavin's admiration of “Prelude” and “At the Bay” and her criticism of “Bliss” and “Miss Brill” offer the possibility of reconciling the sharply contrasting views of Katherine Mansfield's stories found in the writings of Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf. In her essay on Mansfield, Willa Cather sees “Prelude” and “At the Bay” fulfilling the full measure of Mansfield's art: “I doubt whether any contemporary writer has made one feel more keenly the many kinds of personal relations which exist in an everyday ‘happy family’ who are merely going on living their daily lives with no crises or shocks or bewildering complications to try them.”3 Using the two New Zealand stories as a standard of excellence, Cather concludes that Mansfield's unique gift as a storyteller “lay in her interpretation of [the] secret accords and antipathies which lie hidden under our everyday behaviour, and which more than any outward events make our lives happy or unhappy.”4 Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, wrote in her diary that after reading “Bliss,” she concluded that Katherine Mansfield was “done for” as a writer:

Indeed I don't see how much faith in her as woman or writer can survive that sort of story. I shall have to accept the fact, I'm afraid, that her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock. For Bliss is long enough to give her a chance of going deeper. Instead she is content with superficial smartness; and the whole conception is poor, cheap, not the vision, however imperfect, of an interesting mind. She writes badly too.5

By using Katherine Mansfield's search for truth as a standard, Mary Lavin, in her notes for an essay, judges Mansfield's stories in a way that encompasses both Willa Cather's praise and Virginia Woolf's condemnation. She agrees with Cather that “Prelude” and “At the Bay” are perfect expressions of Mansfield's talent and vision; but she also agrees with Woolf that “Bliss,” as well as “Miss Brill,” falls far short of the truth. As to what determines whether or not a writer achieves this elusive goal, Lavin simply writes that in “Prelude” and “At the Bay” the reader experiences the everyday life of the Burnell family, while in “Bliss” and “Miss Brill” the reader learns the truth about Bertha Young and Miss Brill through a convenient and artificial climax. This distinction between experiencing the truth and being told the truth suggests that success or failure in Mansfield's short stories, and perhaps fiction in general, greatly depends upon narrative control. The more a story is dependent upon contrivance, the less successful it is as a truthful representation of life; the less intrusive the narrative of a story, the more it is capable of creating a direct impression of life.

The failing of “Bliss,” then, has nothing to do with what the reader learns about Bertha Young's character or marriage. The story falls short because the revelation of Bertha's truth comes about through the contrivance of her accidental discovery of her husband's affair with Pearl Fulton. Until this climactic moment, the narrative has closely followed the pattern of Bertha's giddy feeling of happiness and security and skillfully used the central symbol of the pear tree to unite Bertha's secret bliss, known to the reader because he shares Bertha's perspective, and Pearl Fulton's, which remains unknown until the fatal moment when Bertha sees Harry's passion for the no longer mysterious Pearl. Whatever “Bliss” reveals about Bertha's fragile illusions and her failure in the past to respond to her husband's desires is undercut by a climax better suited for melodrama than the delicate art of the modern short story.

“Miss Brill” creates a similar character and situation and, unfortunately, also reaches its climax in the same contrived way. Miss Brill compensates for her drab and lonely existence, suggested by her fondness for her shabby fur piece and her dependency upon her vicarious adventures in the Jardins Publiques, by creating the illusion that she is an actress in some wonderful drama of life played out upon the park benches. Her moment of truth, when her fragile illusion is forever shattered, comes to Miss Brill, and to the reader, in exactly the same manner as it does to Bertha Young. The beautifully dressed boy and girl, the newly arrived hero and heroine of Miss Brill's drama, “tell” the eavesdropping actress what her real role in life happens to be:

“No, not now,” said the girl. “Not here, I can't.”


“But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?” asked the boy. “Why does she come here at all—who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?”


“It's her fu-fur which is so funny,” giggled the girl. “It's exactly like a fried whiting.”6

“Bliss” and “Miss Brill” are flawed stories, but not because the truth they reveal about their protagonists is too brutal or painful for the tastes of the common reader. In each story, the climax of the narrative suggests an arranged reality that leaves a lasting impression, not of life, but of the author's cleverness. This strategy of arrangement for dramatic effect or revelation, unfortunately, is common in Katherine Mansfield's fiction. Too often in her stories a dropped remark at the right or wrong moment, a chance meeting or discovery, an intrusive figure in the shape of a fat man at a ball or in the Café de Madrid, a convenient death of a hired man or a stranger dying aboard a ship, or a deus ex machina in the form of two doves, a dill pickle, or a fly plays too much of a role in creating a character's dilemma or deciding the outcome of the narrative. These stories carefully prepare the reader for a revelation of the loneliness of human existence, but, when the vision arrives, it is so contrived that the reader suspects that the lack of passion and loneliness belonged more to the author than the characters in her fiction. Perhaps this is the reason that Virginia Woolf, after reading “Bliss,” concluded that Katherine Mansfield's mind was “a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock.”

“Prelude” and “At the Bay” represent a different kind of story in the Mansfield canon. Through a carefully selected and more naturally arranged series of impressions, Katherine Mansfield creates, in each story, a true sense of the Burnells' family life and the hopes and frustrations of each member of the family. In “Prelude,” her choice of the major narrative event and her skillful use of the natural movement of time are critical in determining the success of the story. Moving day is a normal event in the history of a family, but it is uncommon enough in the life of an individual family, particularly if it means a dramatic change in life style, to draw out emotions that usually remain under the surface or are rarely brought into sharp focus. The disruption of the family routine and the shift from town to country living are normally not sufficient to drive deep wedges into family relationships or permanently impair the emotional life of the individual, but they are enough to create a temporary air of disturbance which, in turn, exposes the emotional truth behind each individual and each relationship in the Burnell family.

“Prelude,” cheating a bit on Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, covers about forty-eight hours in the lives of its characters. Twelve episodes are carefully drawn from this period, so that each one gives a brief impression of the emotional life of the Burnells. By beginning the sequence of impressions with the Burnells loading the last of their belongings on the family buggy, the narrative immediately creates an atmosphere of anticipation, mystery, frustration, and dread, which surrounds the family as it sets out for its new home. The narrative point of view, however, quickly draws the reader's attention away from the physical journey by focusing on the emotions of Kezia, who, with her sister Lottie, is left behind because there is no room on the buggy. Rather than the excitement and adventure of the journey to the new house, the key event in the opening sequence of “Prelude” eventually becomes Kezia's determination not to cry.

Narrative perspective is critical to the atmosphere of truth Katherine Mansfield creates in “Prelude.” By allowing the third person point of view to be controlled by the vision of one of the Burnells, rather than the author's vision, she offers a world in which impressions constitute reality. How each member of the Burnell family perceives the world gradually forms the fabric of truth in the story. No authorial bolt from the heavens is needed in “Prelude” to expose the real thing. The narrative skillfully and delicately supports Henry James's point, in “The Art of Fiction,” that if “experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe.”7

Katherine Mansfield weaves her fabric of truth out of the very air her characters breathe by expanding the perspective occasionally to include the Burnells' family life and by shifting the point of view from individual to individual. When Kezia and Lottie finally arrive at their new home, the narrative perspective, until this moment concerned primarily with Kezia's emotions, embraces the family roles and personalities of the adult Burnells. The father's proprietary and slightly defensive air, the mother's indifference and weariness, the grandmother's sense of responsibility, the aunt's frustrations, all become a part of Kezia's vision; and when the children are put to bed, the point of view narrows and shifts as character after character goes through the process of retiring for the evening. Father, mother, and aunt slowly take on individual identities and feelings as Stanley, Linda, and Beryl. Only Mrs. Fairchild, who discovers Kezia has not fallen asleep because she is waiting for her grandmother to come to bed, is not allowed a moment to return to her secret self.

During the next two days, the narrative continues its movement from character to character, from relationship to relationship, from private emotions to family activity, and from the innocent world of children to the more ominous adult world. From the morning hours, when Linda has her disturbing dream of a tiny bird that becomes a monstrous baby with a gaping bird-mouth, to the evening hours, when Beryl has her narcissistic visions of her romantic self, the Burnell world gradually forms itself into a delicate mosaic of hidden desires, frustrations, and fears.

Life becomes disturbing for the individual in “Prelude” when one character's private or ideal vision of self clashes with his or her perception of the physical world or when a private vision is threatened by the conventional duties demanded by a family role. Stanley's sense of propriety, once more closely observed, becomes an obsession with keeping up appearances for the sake of his public image of what a Stanley Burnell, family man and man of the world, should be. Linda's general weariness, brought into sharper focus, becomes her dread of her family's demands, particularized in her fear of bearing children and, obviously connected, her husband's overbearing attentiveness. Stanley's happiness, lacking only a son to become total joy, is Linda's nightmare. As for Beryl, the source of her frustrations is her conviction that no one in her family sees the true Beryl, that lovely young woman with the romantic readiness for an adventurous life that always seems alarmingly tardy.

Only Mrs. Fairchild, with her strong sense of order and responsibility, seems to have no conflict within herself or with any member of the family. While the aloe, for Linda, seems like an armed ship that will protect her and help her escape the demands of Stanley and her children, it remains, for Mrs. Fairchild, a plant that may or may not show signs of flowering this year. In the last, fleeting moments of “Prelude,” when Linda, emerging out of her dream-like existence, asks her mother for her thoughts, Mrs. Fairchild answers simply that she had been wondering if they would be able to make jam in the autumn. This natural response does far more than any deus ex machina to reveal the world of difference between the emotions and temperaments of mother and daughter—and that difference, as well as all the others that make up the Burnell family, becomes the truth of “Prelude.”

When the narrative of “Prelude” ends with Beryl puzzling over the problem of never quite being able to express her true feelings, the real life of the Burnell family is no longer a puzzle. Marvin Malanger's insight into Katherine Mansfield's intentions in this New Zealand story, to write an “annunciation of the birth of her brother,”8 should not be taken to mean that the narrative evades the life that is for the life to come. The sense of life as an ongoing process of perception and discovery, best exemplified in the open and receptive mind of the autobiographical Kezia, who sees everything, including the beheaded duck destined to become the family's dinner, becomes the real subject matter of “Prelude” and dictates its narrative form. At least in this one story, based on her own childhood experiences, her own process of becoming, Katherine Mansfield achieved what she prayed for but feared she might never accomplish: “Shall I be able to express one day my love of work—my desire to be a better writer—my longing to take greater pains. And the passion I feel. It takes the place of religion—it is my religion—of people—I create my people: of ‘life’—it is Life.”9

“At the Bay,” an intended sequel to “Prelude,” is not as successfully executed, but the similarities in content and form are striking. The episodic pattern is repeated—there are thirteen episodes rather than twelve, but the last is more of a symbolic gesture than an actual narrative episode—and the cyclical movement of the day again becomes the ordering principle of the narrative, though the time pattern is condensed to one day instead of two. The central narrative event, a day at the bay, is a natural one in the history of a family but, like moving day, unusual enough in itself to expose the secret emotional life of the individual members of the Burnell family.

Stanley Burnell is as obsessed as ever with his public image as a man among men; Linda, now with an infant son, holds an even greater grudge against life; Beryl still suffers from her Gatsby complex; Mrs. Fairchild continues to hold the family together, while her daughter imagines the forms of things unknown; the children, as always, act as children. The disruption or flaw in “At the Bay,” however, comes from outside the family circle. Katherine Mansfield's introduction of the Kembers into the Burnells' pattern of existence, more than any other element in the narrative, creates the dark and threatening atmosphere that pervades “At the Bay” and separates its vision of life from that in “Prelude.”

At times in “At the Bay” it appears as if the Kembers tamper with life, making everything small, mean, and disgusting. Even the children share this sense of a malevolent underworld which threatens their daylight fantasies and games in the form of the approaching dark and the “spectre” of Jonathan Trout. Linda's secret feeling of being broken and made weak by child-bearing, Kezia's insistence that her grandmother never die, and Beryl's fascination with the Kembers, including her dream-turned-nightmare encounter with Harry Kember, are a part of a dark pattern that seems artificially consistent when compared to the myriad visions and truths of “Prelude.” The last episode, devoid of humanity, reflects Beryl's plight, but it also captures in a symbolic moment the oppressive atmosphere of “At the Bay,” which gradually becomes the narrative's chief limitation: “A cloud, small, serene, floated across the moon. In that moment of darkness the sea sounded deep, troubled. Then the cloud sailed away, and the sound of the sea was a vague murmur, as though it waked out of a dark dream. All was still.”10

There are several Mansfield stories closer in conception and execution to “Prelude” and “At the Bay” than “Bliss” and “Miss Brill.” “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” in a series of brief, comic episodes, reveals the emotional timidity of Josephine and Constantia and their ridiculous ineffectuality, which, in an incredible way, has become their defense against the coarse realities surrounding them. After contrived opening scenes, “Something Childish But Very Natural” and “Je ne Parle pas Français” eventually reveal the failure of one character to respond to the desperate needs of another. In each case, the lack of feeling, the inability to respond, damns the character. “The Little Girl,” “A Doll's House,” “Sun and Moon,” and “A Voyage” are finely drawn studies of the natural conflict between the innocent and receptive world of the child and the insensitive, socially conscious adult world. The latter two stories flawlessly portray this conflict from the uncorrupted perspective of the child. In all of these stories, Mansfield's purpose is more the revelation of the secret, emotional life of her characters than her own private vision of reality; but only in “Prelude” did she achieve that perfect blend of form and content that inspired Willa Cather and Mary Lavin to use the story as a standard for great fiction.

Mary Lavin's interest in Katherine Mansfield's stories extends beyond the matter of respect for craft or even influence. In her own career, Lavin has struggled with the same dilemma she encountered in Mansfield's fiction. Her concern with the success of “Prelude” and the failure of “Bliss” and “Miss Brill” reflects her own often agonizing decisions about the purpose and integrity of fiction and her successes and failures in executing her private vision of the art of the short story.

At the beginning of her career, because she was writing a Chekhovian short story in which nothing seems to happen but everything is revealed, Mary Lavin was being advised to get more plot into her stories. Lord Dunsany, one of her earliest admirers, even suggested that she use O. Henry as a model. Her answer to Dunsany was a short story she wrote in 1939 called “A Story with a Pattern.” The first person narrator of this story-within-a-story is a writer who is confronted at a party by a well-intentioned critic. Though he likes her stories, the critic warns her to put more substance into her stories by adding more interesting and well-rounded endings. When the writer resists this view and challenges the critic to produce a story with a pattern, she hears the tale of Murty Lockwood, a wealthy landowner born with clubfeet, who suspects his beautiful wife of infidelity. Only when she dies in the process of delivering a still-born child does Murty have his indisputable proof of her faithfulness—the dead child has clubfeet.

The artist-writer, still resisting the temptation to become the writer-entertainer, holds to her own belief that life “isn't rounded off like that at the edges, out into neat shapes.”11 Her decision reflects her creator's own determination to resist the well-meaning advice of Lord Dunsany and to write the kind of story she found and admired in the writings of Chekhov, James, Woolf, and Mansfield. By the time Mary Lavin wrote her comments on Mansfield's fiction in her notes for an essay on the short story, she had written several stories which, according to her own definition, are truthful because they invite the reader to share in the emotional life of her characters. Unfortunately, because her early fiction was not generally accepted even when it was praised by the critics, she had also written, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a number of stories which, like “Bliss” and “Miss Brill,” impose the truth upon the reader through some narrative contrivance.

In her notes, Mary Lavin singles out “Posy” and “A Small Bequest” as stories she now hates. The choice is significant because both were published in 1951 in the same collection with “A Story with a Pattern,” which she had written years earlier as a protest against the contrived writing “Posy” and “A Small Bequest” so well represent. “Posy” is the story of a well-to-do young man who returns to the village of his mother's youth to learn something about her past. A timid and lifeless shopkeeper, unaware that he is addressing her son, tells the young man about Posy, a high-spirited family servant he narrowly escaped marrying because his sisters practically drove her from the village. The reward for the attentive reader in this story with a pattern is gradually discovering, through the healthy and prosperous appearance of the young man, that Posy found happiness and wealth after she left the village, while the shopkeeper, missing his one chance for love, led an empty and insignificant life. The narrative strategy is clever, but the cleverness, as it usually does in this kind of story, draws attention more to the writer than to the life of the characters.

“A Small Bequest,” like “Posy” and, to a less obvious degree, “Bliss” and “Miss Brill,” relies heavily upon a clever resolution of the story's conflict. Its success is entirely dependent upon the diabolical and ingenious way in which Adeline Tate carries out her revenge against her female companion, Emma Blodgett. Resentful of Miss Blodgett's excessive familiarity in calling her by her family name, Aunt Adeline, Miss Tate returns from the grave to get back at her companion by leaving a small bequest in her will for her fond niece Emma. Since Miss Blodgett is not a blood relative, she loses her legacy on a legal technicality; and since Miss Tate's ever faithful companion believes her “Aunt Adeline” made an error in her will out of an excess of love, Miss Tate's revenge is accomplished with impunity.

In her notes, Mary Lavin, while rejecting “Posy” and “A Small Bequest” by the same standard she used to condemn “Bliss” and “Miss Brill,” also states her belief that in another story, “A Cup of Tea,” she succeeded in giving the reader the opportunity to experience the truth. Lavin's “A Cup of Tea” has little in common with a Katherine Mansfield story bearing the same title.12 Mansfield's “A Cup of Tea” is a patterned story of a young woman who befriends a starving young girl until her husband casually mentions that the girl is absolutely lovely. This single remark, the same contrivance used in “Bliss” and “Miss Brill,” changes Rosemary Fell's decision to take care of the girl. Instead of keeping the girl with her, she decides that a wiser course is to give her three five pound notes and a quick good-bye. The conclusion is clever, funny, but obviously contrived.

The key narrative event in Lavin's “A Cup of Tea” is deliberately and deceptively simple and insignificant—a mother and daughter fall into a heated argument over whether or not boiled milk spoils the taste of tea. The truth of “A Cup of Tea” exists in the emotional undercurrents in the family which briefly come to the surface during the incident of the boiled milk. The unspoken antagonism between Sophy and her mother, because of the mother's empty life with her husband and Sophy's desire to escape the emotional circle of her mother's failure, flares out into the open for a brief moment in spite of their efforts to avoid a confrontation. The fact that the daughter has been away at the university and has just returned home for a visit aggravates and intensifies the emotional conflict and sets the stage for any minor incident, even boiled milk, to provoke an outburst of pent-up emotions.

“A Cup of Tea” is told from the third person limited perspective of the mother and shifts to Sophy's perspective only in the last moments of the story. The narrative, then, focuses on the mother's desperate and futile efforts to keep her feelings of frustration and loneliness under control, while she tries to enjoy her daughter's visit. Her need for her daughter's affection and approval, however, is so strong that it is only a matter of the time it takes the milk to boil until mother and daughter release their mutual resentment and hostility. When Sophy is finally alone, she comes up with a simple solution to her family's emotional problems that, unfortunately, reveals only her own inexperience and her fragile hope that she will escape the mistakes of her father and mother: “People would all have to become alike. They would have to look alike and speak alike and feel and talk and think alike. It was so simple. It was so clear! She was surprised that no one had thought of it before.”13

One of Mary Lavin's finest stories, “A Cup of Tea” also has the basic characteristics of her fiction, the eternal conflict between individuals with naturally opposed interests and sensibilities and the brief revelation of one individual's lonely and bitter life when faced with a disturbing confrontation with its opposite self. Other early stories, like “At Sallygap” and “A Happy Death,” are carefully designed studies of the breakdown of the emotional relationship between husband and wife. In each story, Lavin skillfully uses a shifting perspective to expose the secret loneliness and buried hostility and frustration that have been festering over the years. Later in her career, after her brief and temporary interest in the story with a pattern, she converted her basic theme, primarily because of the tragic loss of her first husband, William Walsh, into the widow's painful and frightening search for self-identity.14 “In the Middle of the Fields,” “In a Café,” and “The Cuckoo-spit” are not only symbolic of her recovery from her own grief and despair; they also signal a return to the form of her early stories after a phase in which she gave her critics what they wanted. Each of her widow stories, narrated from the perspective of the widow, marks a phase in a long and difficult struggle to understand the relationship between past memories and the emotional pain of the present in finding a new life and identity.

The stories with a pattern in the fiction of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin represent the lesser achievement of two artists of talent and vision. “Posy” and “A Small Bequest” are examples of a writer using more talent than vision, while “Bliss” and “Miss Brill” reveal a writer with a tendency to impose a dark vision on life from time to time. In “Prelude” and “A Cup of Tea,” however, Mansfield and Lavin achieved that moment in the career of an artist when vision blends perfectly with the execution of craft. Mary Lavin recognized this achievement when she read “Prelude” and felt that she had come close to the same goal in “A Cup of Tea.”

While obviously linking the visions and talents of Katherine Mansfield and Mary Lavin, “Prelude” and “A Cup of Tea” also form a circle of truth with other masterpieces of fiction by Flaubert, Chekhov, Henry James, James Joyce, and other modern short-story writers who tried to create a perfect balance between subject and form. When this balance is achieved in Un Coeur Simple, “The Kiss,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Dead,” “Prelude,” and “A Cup of Tea,” the reader experiences a radiant moment of truth perhaps best expressed by Browning's monks, who gaze at the magnificence of Fra Lippo Lippi's painting and exclaim—“It's the life!” Mansfield described this experience, this mysterious relationship between writer and reader which she believed Dostoevsky best created, as the sense of sharing.15 And this blend of writer's and reader's talent and imagination, this process of sharing, is what makes the artist “a child of the sun16 and gives the reader the joy of knowing the truth about life—for a great work of art “takes upon itself a Life—bad work has death in it.”17

Notes

  1. Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 135.

  2. The notes are a part of the Mary Lavin collection in the rare book room at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale.

  3. On Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 108.

  4. On Writing, p. 110.

  5. A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953), p. 2.

  6. The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), p. 553.

  7. The Portable Henry James, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 402.

  8. Katherine Mansfield (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 31.

  9. Journal of Katherine Mansfield, p. 112.

  10. The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield, p. 299.

  11. A Single Lady, and Other Stories (London: Michael Joseph, 1951), p. 103.

  12. Mansfield's “Her First Ball” and Lavin's “The Young Girls” are similar studies of young girls' unsettling initiation into the whirl and danger of the adult world and suggest influence. Lavin's “A Memory,” a study of the emotionless relationship between a man and woman who believe they are superior to life's gross passions, is also strikingly similar to Mansfield's “Psychology,” which features the same falsely superior types. The endings, however, are entirely different. The Mansfield couple, out of sheer cowardice, continues its anemic relationship, while Lavin's pair loses its perfect arrangement when the female unleashes her frustration on the hapless male.

  13. The Long Ago, and Other Stories (London: Michael Joseph, 1944), p. 37.

  14. A tragic coincidence of the careers of Mansfield and Lavin is the pivotal role in their art played by the death of a loved one: Mansfield's younger brother, Leslie Beauchamp, and Lavin's first husband, William Walsh.

  15. Novels and Novelists, ed. John Middleton Murry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), p. 118.

  16. Journal of Katherine Mansfield, p. 254.

  17. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 363.

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