1
Miss Brill

• Katherine Mansfield

2
Building Context

• "Miss Brill was written in 1920 and published in
  the 1922 collection of stories entitled The
  Garden Party.
• The story's enduring popularity is due in part to
  its use of a stream-of-consciousness narrative in
  which Miss Brill's character is revealed through
  her thoughts about others as she watches a crowd
  from a park bench.
• It has become one of Mansfield's most popular
  stories, and has been reprinted in numerous
  anthologies and collections.
• The story is typical of Mansfield's style she
  often employed stream-of-consciousness narration
  in order to show the psychological complexity of
  everyday experience in her characters' lives.

3
Katherine Mansfield

• Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield
  Beauchamp to a wealthy family in Wellington, New
  Zealand, on October 14, 1888.
• She was educated in London, deciding early on
  that she wanted to be a writer. She studied
  music, wrote for the school newspaper, and gained
  her intellectual freedom by studying Oscar Wilde
  and the other English writers of the early
  twentieth century.
• Three years later she returned to New Zealand,
  where her parents expected her to find a suitable
  husband and lead the life of a well-bred woman.
  However, Mansfield was rebellious, adventurous,
  and more captivated with the artistic community
  than of polite society.
• She began publishing stories in Australian
  magazines in 1907 and shortly thereafter returned
  to London.

4
Katherine Mansfield The Rebel

• A brief affair left her pregnant, and she
  consented to marry a man, George Bowden, whom she
  had known a mere three weeks and who was not the
  father of her child.
• She dressed in black for the wedding and left him
  before the night was over. Upon receiving word of
  the scandal, and fueled by rumors that her
  daughter had also been involved with several
  women, Mansfield's mother immediately sailed to
  London and placed her daughter in a spa in
  Germany, far away from the Bohemian artists'
  community of London and her best friend, Ida
  Baker, whom Mansfield's mother considered a bad
  influence.
• During her time in Germany, Mansfield suffered a
  miscarriage and was cut out of her parents' will.
• After returning to London, Mansfield moved in
  with Baker, continuing to write and conduct
  various love affairs.

5
Mansfield and Murry
6
Mansfield and Murry

• In 1911 Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton
  Murry, magazine editor, began a relationship that
  culminated in their marriage in 1918.
• They led a troubled life during this time -
  Mansfield left Murry twice in their first two
  years together.
• Mansfield's life and work were changed forever by
  the 1915 death of her brother, Leslie Heron
  "Chummie" Beauchamp, as a New Zealand soldier in
  France in World War I.
• She was shocked and traumatized by the
  experience, so much so that her work began to
  take refuge in the nostalgic reminiscences of
  their childhood in New Zealand.
• Despite this turbulence in Mansfield's life, she
  entered into her most productive period of
  writing in early 1916, and her relationship with
  Murry also improved.
• At the beginning of 1917 Mansfield and Murry
  separated, although he continued to visit her at
  her new apartment. Baker, whom Mansfield often
  called, with mixture of affection and disdain,
  her "wife", moved in with her shortly afterwards.
• In December 1917 Mansfield became ill, and was
  diagnosed with tuberculosis. She moved to Bandol,
  France, and stayed at a half-deserted and cold
  hotel, where she became depressed.

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Katherine Mansfield Final Years

• Mansfield spent her last years seeking
  increasingly unorthodox cures for her
  tuberculosis. In February 1922, she consulted a
  Russian physicians "revolutionary" treatment,
  which resulted in hot flashes and numbness in her
  legs.
• The Dictionary of National Biography reports that
  she started to feel that her attitude to life had
  been unduly rebellious, and she sought, during
  the days that remained to her, to renew and
  compose her spiritual life.
• Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary hemorrhage
  in January 1923, after running up a flight of
  stairs to show Murry how well she was. She died
  on 9 January and was buried in a cemetery in
  France.
• Mansfield proved to be a prolific writer in the
  final years of her life, and much of her prose
  and poetry remained unpublished at her death.
  Murry took on the task of editing and publishing
  her works.
• His efforts resulted in publication of two
  additional volumes of short stories in 1923 (The
  Dove's Nest), in 1924 (Something Childish), her
  Poems, The Aloe, a collection of critical
  writings (Novels and Novelists) and a number of
  editions of her letters and journals.

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Miss Brill - Plot

• The story is about Miss Brill, a middle-aged
  English teacher living by the "Jardins publics",
  the Public Gardens, in a French town.
• The story begins by Miss Brill "deciding on her
  fur... dear little thing! It was nice to feel
  it again
• Sunday afternoon in the park, which she spends
  walking and sitting in the park.
• She sees the world as a play, if it were a stage,
  and enjoys watching the people around her, often
  judging them and eavesdropping on the strangers.
• The reader learns that Miss Brill's life must be
  unfilled and this is how she develops her pride.

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Miss Brill - Plot

• When she arrives at the park, she notices that
  there are more people than last Sunday, and the
  band is especially louder because the Season had
  commenced.
• Sitting next to her on the bench was an elderly
  couple. Their lack of conversation disappointed
  Miss Brill because she enjoys, "sitting in other
  people's lives just for a minute while they
  talked round her.
• Watching others in the park, she notices that
  most of the people that sit on the benches are
  the same the people are elderly, silent, idle,
  and appear as though they have come from a small
  dark place.
• A woman drops her violet roses, only to be picked
  up and returned by a young boy. The woman
  proceeds to dispose of them, and Miss Brill does
  not know if that is to be well-regarded.
• After the elderly couple left the bench, Miss
  Brill seemed to believe that even she took part
  in the play she attended every Sunday.

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Miss Brill - Plot

• Beginning to daydream about how she reads to an
  elderly man four times a week, she plays a
  scenario in her mind with the man. She envisions
  that he would no longer sleep through the stories
  as he normally does once he realized she was an
  actress, and he would become engaged and excited.
  
• Continuing her idea of the play as the band
  played a new song, she envisioned everybody in
  the park taking part in the song and singing, and
  she begins to cry at the thought of this.
• A young couple sit on the bench where the elderly
  couple had been before. Miss Brill believes they
  are nicely dressed and she is prepared to listen.
  
• As she does, she hears the boy make a rude remark
  about her being a "stupid old thing", and the
  girl responds, "It's her fu-fur which is so
  funny, which hurts Miss Brill terribly because
  of her love of her fur.

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Miss Brill - Plot

• On her way home, a typical Sunday would involve
  the purchase of cake at the bakery, but instead
  she went home into her own dark room.
• As she quickly put her fur back in its box, she
  hears a cry, this cry is Miss Brill.
• The reason why the story says, "she thinks she
  hears a cry is because Miss Brill does not want
  to accept that she is the one crying, or accept
  herself for that matter.
• Mansfield's use of rhetorical devices throughout
  the passage reveals a sense of loneliness
  belonging to Miss Brill.

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Miss Brill Point of View

• This story is written in the Third Person Limited
  Omniscient point of view.
• We know only what is going on inside Miss Brills
  mind and what she sees and hears.
• This is the case until later in the story, after
  she is rejected by the young people, and the
  narration switches to Objective.

13
Symbolism

• Fur She refers to the fur as a "rogue" which is
  ironic that she is very attached to this garment.
  
• A rogue is an adventurer which she lacks in her
  life.
• The fur lives a similar story as she does, living
  in a dark small room, getting hit in the nose as
  she did when the boy made the rude remark about
  her, and when returning to the box, crying for
  its destruction, and Miss Brill crying for her
  hurt soul.
• Ermine toque The nice fur has now decayed and
  withered.
• This fur is similar to those sitting on the
  benches at the park, and Miss Brill herself.
• Orchestra Her emotions are reflective of the
  gaiety of the songs played by the orchestra.
• The orchestra mostly plays throughout Miss
  Brill's entire park experience. It is her that
  ranges in emotions, like the many genres the
  orchestra must have played.

14
Themes

• Loneliness
• Illusion vs. Reality
• Rejection
• Isolation