Five-minute digest
Bliss and Other Stories
Summary
Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield's second collection, gathers fourteen stories written between about 1915 and 1920. It opens with Prelude, her longest work, and moves between New Zealand childhood, Bohemian London, Paris cafés and the hotels of the French Riviera. The stories favor a single day or evening, a shift of mood, and an ending that stops at a moment of recognition rather than resolving a plot. Prelude, in twelve numbered sections, follows the Burnell family's move to a house in the country, modeled on Mansfield's childhood in Karori near Wellington. The small girls Lottie and Kezia are left behind for an afternoon and ride out at night on the storeman's dray; their mother Linda drifts through the days in a dreamy detachment from her hearty husband Stanley; her sister Beryl longs for romance and writes affected letters; the grandmother, Mrs. Fairfield, quietly runs the house. The handyman Pat beheads a duck before the fascinated children, and Linda shows Kezia an aloe that flowers once every hundred years. Je ne parle pas français is narrated by Raoul Duquette, a vain young Parisian writer who recalls how his English friend Dick Harmon brought a woman called Mouse to Paris and then abandoned her by letter. In Bliss, thirty-year-old Bertha Young, filled with unaccountable happiness, gives a dinner party, feels a mysterious bond with her guest Pearl Fulton as they look at the flowering pear tree in her garden, and at the end of the evening sees her husband Harry quietly arranging to meet Miss Fulton. The pear tree, she sees, is as lovely as ever. The shorter pieces vary in tone. The Wind Blows follows the girl Matilda through a gusty day of music lessons and a walk with her brother Bogey. Psychology traces a near-romance between two artists that never finds words. Pictures shows the out-of-work contralto Ada Moss tramping the film agencies of London. The Man without a Temperament portrays Robert Salesby, patient and silent, tending his invalid wife in a Riviera hotel. Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day satirizes a vain singing teacher. Sun and Moon is told by small children who see the ice-pudding house they admired at their parents' party demolished. Feuille d'Album follows a shy painter, Ian French, as he follows a girl and invents an excuse to speak to her. A Dill Pickle stages the meeting of former lovers after six years. The Little Governess sends a young Englishwoman alone to Germany, where an old man's kindness proves false. Revelations finds the nervous Monica Tyrell learning that her hairdresser's little daughter has died, and The Escape ends with a quarreling couple on a stalled journey and a husband's moment of peace before a tree. Constable of London published the collection in 1920, dedicated to John Middleton Murry; several stories had appeared first in magazines such as The New Age and The Athenaeum.
Top Lessons
Happiness that rests on illusion
Bertha's bliss is real as a feeling but rests on a misreading of the people around her. Mansfield shows how quickly a carefully arranged life can be revealed as other than it seemed, and leaves the reader with Bertha's question about what comes next.
A child's eye on adult life
In Prelude and Sun and Moon children watch the adult world without fully understanding it, and their wonder and fear sharpen what adults overlook. Kezia's terror at the duck's death and her delight in the aloe give the story its moral center.
Loneliness in company
Again and again Mansfield's characters stand beside one another without truly meeting: Robert and Jinnie, the two artists in Psychology, Vera and her old lover. The stories ask what keeps people from speaking honestly.
Grief that interrupts self-concern
In Revelations Monica's preoccupation with her nerves is pierced by the news that George's little girl has died. Mansfield shows a self-absorbed person suddenly confronted with real sorrow, and how quickly she tries to turn it into a gesture.
Verified Quotes
“There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy.”
“The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something; the blind stem cut into the air as if no wind could ever shake it.”
“My name is Raoul Duquette. I am twenty-six years old and a Parisian, a true Parisian.”
Frequently cited
“Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at—nothing—at nothing, simply.”
Frequently cited
“But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.”
“It is only the wind shaking the house, rattling the windows, banging a piece of iron on the roof and making her bed tremble.”
“And then, after six years, she saw him again.”
“Deep, deep, he sank into the silence, staring at the tree and waiting for the voice that came floating, falling, until he felt himself enfolded.”
Medical Lens
The collection is not medical, but several stories touch the concerns of a psychiatric reader. The Man without a Temperament shows the patient, silent fatigue of a husband nursing a chronically ill wife at a Riviera hotel; her illness is not named, though Mansfield wrote the story in 1920 at Menton while ill with tuberculosis herself, and biographers often read it against her own marriage. Revelations sketches a woman whose life is ruled by her nerves in the early twentieth-century sense of the word, and Bliss renders a state of elated, almost overflowing feeling that the story treats as mood rather than illness. Readings that link these portraits to Mansfield's life are interpretive.
- The Man without a Temperament
Robert Salesby's routine of shawls, medicines and walks for his invalid wife Jinnie, and his silent memories of England.
- Revelations
Monica Tyrell's morning crisis of nerves, her flight to the hairdresser, and the news of the death of George's little daughter.