Miss Brill — A Classic Short Story by Katherine Mansfield

About this episode

The episode features a reading of Katherine Mansfield's short story 'Miss Brill', exploring themes of loneliness and observation in a public garden setting.

On a bright Sunday afternoon in a French public garden, a lonely English teacher lifts her treasured fox fur from its box, settles onto her usual bench, and quietly borrows the lives going on around her. Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill," first published in 1920, is a small marvel, barely two thousand words that somehow hold an entire life up to the light. The band plays, the season has begun, the crowd parades, and Miss Brill, watching, decides she too has a part in the great Sunday performance. It is warm and observant and quietly shattering, modernist storytelling at its most humane, and it ends on a single image you won't soon shake. Read by Don McDonald. Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, and spent most of her short adult life in England and on the Continent, restless, often ill, and always writing. She is remembered now as one of the great modernists of the short story, a writer who could fit an entire life inside a few pages and turn it slowly in the light. Virginia Woolf, not a generous judge of her contemporaries, once confessed that Mansfield's was the only writing she had ever been jealous of. Mansfield died in France in 1923, of…

People in this episode

Host: Short Storyverses

Guest: Don McDonald

Topics covered

• loneliness
• modernism
• short story
• observation
• performance

Keywords

• Miss Brill
• Katherine Mansfield
• short story
• modernism
• loneliness
• French garden
• Don McDonald

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Short Storyverses

Places: Wellington, New Zealand, France

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