I read Katherine Mansfield and this story obsessively when I was looking after my mum in the year before her death. I had, still have, the idea of a writing a collection of essays about this one story, drawing on my many readings. The setting is brilliant: a long stay hotel in the South of France where nearly everyone is on special diets. The gossipy, fussy clientele are nearly all displaced by illness or the aftermath of the First World War. It’s about the complicated dynamic between carer and cared-for, though in this case it’s a married couple, not a child and their parent. And we see nearly everything from the carer’s point of view. Robert’s wife Jinnie could be dying – it isn’t certain – but what Jinnie knows or thinks about this is not the focus of the story, though it scratches at the door wanting to come in. Just how resentful Robert may be is revealed by his shocking final word in the story, but it’s not conclusive. The setting and minor characters contribute actively to the psychological dynamic between husband and wife. Robert is devoted and punctilious but also distracted and resentful and Mansfield’s representation of conventional masculinity being undermined is just brilliant.
First published in Art and Letters, Spring 2020, then collected in Bliss and Other Stories Constable, 1920. Now widely available, including in the Selected Stories, Oxford World Classics, 2008
A Personal Anthology 