‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ by Katherine Mansfield

You find all the modern literary virtues in the stories of Katherine Mansfield: brevity and concision, acute psychological insight matched with subtlety of expression. She died a century ago, yet the manner of her writing – its weighted ironies, its poise – makes it feel as fresh today as when it was published. Mansfield left behind letters and journals in which she lamented her inability to write novels; I wonder if a lifetime in longform fiction would have produced as valuable a body of work. Virginia Woolf, who rather disliked her, confessed that “I was jealous of her writing… the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is a study in decaying gentility and arrested development, as we join three spinsters (it takes us time to understand that they are not as young as their talk and behaviour suggests) in the days after the death of the patriarch. Their resolute girlishness, even as middle age lengthens their odds of marriage or change, protects them psychologically from their financial troubles even as it worsens them. This is a poignant character study that exemplifies the ‘show don’t tell’ dictum of creative writing workshops. How skilfully Mansfield skims into the perspectives of her characters, even as she dwells, elsewhere, on the surface where our imagination must do the interpretive work. Few writers choose their words with such precision. Consider this moment, where their contemptuous servant brings the sisters dessert:

And proud young Kate […] came in to see what the old tabbies wanted now. She snatched away their plates of mock something or other and slapped down a white, terrified blancmange.
‘Jam, please, Kate,’ said Josephine kindly.
Kate knelt and burst open the sideboard, lifted the lid of the jam-pot, saw it was empty, put it on the table, and stalked off.
‘I’m afraid it’s empty,’ said Nurse Andrews a moment later […]
Constantia looked dubious. ‘We can’t disturb Kate again,’ she said softly.

First published in the London Mercury, May 1921. Collected in The Garden Party and other stories by Katharine Mansfield, Constable & Co., London, 1922, and widely thereafter