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What Do I Read Next?
(Short Stories for Students)
- Mansfield's "Bliss," written in 1918 is another story of a woman's struggle with dissatisfaction and alienation. Bertha is young, married, and a new mother. Her husband is successful, and a nurse helps her with her new baby. A joyous dinner party, with its liveliness and opportunity for interpersonal penetration and imagination, only serves to heighten Bertha's isolation when it ends and she is left once again with a comparatively empty house.
- Kathenne Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (1929) concerns a dying woman's final thoughts. Written in the stream-of-consciousness style, Granny Weatherall's interior monologue is notable for what it contains as well as for what is left unspoken.
- A more intimate biography of Katherine Mansfield is provided by LM (Ida Constance Baker) in her 1971 memoir Katherine Mansfield: The Memories of LM. LM was Mansfield's close friend and assistant. The book was published in 1971 by Michael Joseph Ltd. and reprinted in 1985 by Virago Press.
- Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall," first published in 1917, also uses a stream-of-consciousness narrative style like "Miss Brill." A woman contemplates a mark on the wall, imagining what it might be. In the course of her thoughts, her mind wanders over a variety of subjects.
- "Araby" by James Joyce first published in Dubliners (1914), recounts a young narrator's stark realization that the world of romance and religion in which he had immersed himself is a foolish, inaccurate view of reality.
- Heather Murray's Double Lives: Women in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield provides a feminist interpretation of Mansfield's work. It was published in 1990 by the University of Otago Press.