Themes: Alienation and Loneliness

While Miss Brill never directly admits it, her behavior indicates that she is a lonely individual. On her Sunday outing, she doesn't think about any family but instead focuses on her few students and an old man to whom she reads the newspaper several times each week. Her name, Miss Brill, carries a sense of formal detachment; using only her last name without a first name prevents any personal connection with the reader. In her fantasy, she...

Themes: Appearances and Reality

In "Miss Brill," Mansfield employs a stream-of-consciousness style to emphasize the stark contrast between appearances and reality through the protagonist's inner thoughts. At the beginning of the story, Miss Brill is disturbed by an elderly couple silently seated on a nearby bench, making it difficult for her to listen in on their lives. She doesn't realize that their silence reflects her own quiet life. Miss Brill also notices that the other...

Themes: Exile and Isolation

Mansfield herself knew well the plight of a woman on her own living in exile: The last years of her life were a frenetic search for health on the Continent. The pleurisy that afflicted her in 1917 was later aggravated into tuberculosis; she died at the age of thirty-four near Fontainebleau, France, in 1923, when a coughing fit ruptured blood vessels.

Themes: Self-Deception and Fantasy

Characteristically, Mansfield imports a term from her native New Zealand for effect: “brill” is a common fish without culinary or commercial value. However, clearly, Miss Brill is not a figure of contempt; her self-deception is a very human response to what she feels is becoming an intolerable reality; moreover, her apprehension of something at work inside her, alternately numbing and tingling, explains her displaced feelings and her need to...

Themes: Need to Belong

In addition to the theme of exile, there is Miss Brill’s achingly human need to belong. The narrator’s adroit mediation between what Miss Brill literally sees and what her imagination invents accounts for her somewhat hysterical attempt to participate in life as more than a spectator. It is equally obvious, however, that to retreat into a fantasy world is merely to delay truth; Miss Brill’s shrill efforts to coerce others into her fantasy, such...

Themes: Reality and Truth

Finally, chastened by the snarling young man and the young woman’s mockery, Miss Brill is left without any defense other than the false sense of buoyancy she has conjured to protect her from reality. Alone in her room, she is unable to deceive herself, nor can she yet accept full knowledge of her condition. Still detached from her feelings, Miss Brill thinks that she hears the fox weeping. Mansfield’s husband—the author and editor John Middleton...