The story becomes a revelation of huge offence. That Ma Parker, like the child himself, has ‘nothing’ is offence enough, but Mansfield takes it even further. It’s not just offensive that there’s no place in life for Ma Parker to give voice to her losses, it’s deeply offensive that there’s no literary place for her either – not even in this story. Here are its last lines: ‘Ma Parker stood, looking up and down. The icy wind blew out her apron into a balloon. And now it began to rain. There was nowhere.’ At the same time as giving her a life and a literary space, the story performs the withholding of both. It robs her, like ‘life’ has, of all dignity, there with her apron blown out like a balloon.

At her most lost and tragic, she will still have to withstand comic caricature. It is Mansfield’s most eloquent cry against corruption.

‘Do you, too feel an infinite delight and value in detail –’ Katherine Mansfield wrote to her friend, S. S. Koteliansky, in 1915 – ‘not for the sake of detail but for the life in the life of it’. 34 ‘Miniaturist’ so often becomes a kind of literary slur, the opposite of critical weightiness. Mansfield, who understood, both in her fiction and in her life circumstances, what tragic mundanity and Chekhovian stoicism literally meant, and who could catch the tragic and the bathetic in the same tiny gesture, dealt detail with a kind of lifeforce.

As a schoolgirl she had had a typical, if particularly finely expressed, fin-de-siècle penchant for sentimental stories of romantic deathwish; she had written loving, luxuriating pieces on the passing of time, imaginings of the melancholy longings of gone ghosts in the night sky over London, studies of the ‘slow, sweet, shadowful death of a Rose’. 35 When this sensibility met, head-on, the foul realities of the First World War and the brutal factual circumstance of personal illness, an eagerness to be alive and an energy for life itself forged, in her work, a new formal expression and an innovative use of voice.

On Mansfield’s death, Virginia Woolf was bereft. Their argument had settled, in one of their final meetings, into a fascinating question of personality in writing. ‘I said how my own character seemed to cut out a shape like a shadow in front of me. This she understood (I give it as an example of her understanding) & proved it by telling me that she thought this bad: one ought to merge into things.’ Now the only writer able to make her jealous was gone, there was ‘no point in writing any more … Katherine won’t read it – Katherine’s my rival no longer.’ 36

‘This pioneer did not shrink from life,’ Brigid Brophy said, commenting on the paradoxical near-brutality, the formidable nature, in writing so deceptively slight, so easily dismissed as delicate. 37 ‘One of the great Modernist writers of displacement, restlessness, mobility, impermanence … she wrote so well about writing, since she invested the life she wouldn’t see again in it … Mansfield’s work speaks about what’s inevitably lost, material, mortal, unless it’s turned to artifice,’ Lorna Sage said, summing up the paradoxical place in art, so attractive to Mansfield and so central to her aesthetic, where brevity meets longevity. 38

The last word here is Mansfield’s own, and it comes from before she had published very much, when she was young, idealistic, hopelessly in love, and already the prose holds all her customary impatience, her energy, her attention to detail, her lifelove, the inklings of that fruitful double tension between creativity and violence, her skill of shifting perspective, her ability to see the huge in the small and vice versa, and her literary gift for merging into, or giving herself over to, the performance, the creative act, the life in the life of it.

Why is it we so love the strong emotions? I think because they give us such a keen sense of Life – a violent belief in our Existence. One thing I cannot bear and that is the mediocre – I like always to have a great grip of Life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant. 39

Ali Smith

Bliss
and other stories

To

John Middleton Murry

Prelude

I

THERE was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance. Isabel, very superior, was perched beside the new handy-man on the driver’s seat. Holdalls, bags and boxes were piled upon the floor. “These are absolute necessities that I will not let out of my sight for one instant,” said Linda Burnell, her voice trembling with fatigue and excitement.

Lottie and Kezia stood on the patch of lawn just inside the gate all ready for the fray in their coats with brass anchor buttons and little round caps with battleship ribbons. Hand in hand, they stared with round solemn eyes, first at the absolute necessities and then at their mother.

“We shall simply have to leave them. That is all. We shall simply have to cast them off,” said Linda Burnell. A strange little laugh flew from her lips; she leaned back against the buttoned leather cushions and shut her eyes, her lips trembling with laughter. Happily at that moment Mrs.