The narrator in the linking ‘Pension’ stories of In a German Pension can be seen as both a central part of the story and an observer, or audience, to it. In the later collections her stories assume a reader as their participant and observing audience. The eponymous protagonist of ‘Miss Brill’ (whose name and the title of which suggest light, brilliance, and something cut short), discovers the pitfalls of performance when the social ‘role’ she’s given by others to play puts her as firmly in a box as she finally puts her own old fox-fur; the girl in ‘The Little Governess’ will learn that role is deceptive, that imagining that others have a safe role, or can be fixed in role, is naive and dangerous; paradoxically, the young girl who falls for an actor in ‘Taking the Veil’ finds out as soon as she feels anything ‘real’ how impossible it is to escape narrative contrivance in the expressing, even to herself, of this very real feeling.

Mansfield sees the rituals of desire as theatre-based. A shining paragraph in the unfinished fragment ‘Daphne’ makes this clear. ‘There was a theatre too, a big bare building plastered over with red and blue bills … I found it, for some reason, fearfully exciting … what women! What girls in muslin dresses with velvet sashes and little caps edged with swansdown! … I leaned against a pillar that looked as though it was made of wedding-cake icing – and fell in love with whole rows at a time …’ Her stories can even be said to ‘perform’ themselves, as a means of questioning or searching for the realities behind, and the relationship with reality in, people’s everyday masks, roles or performances. In the act of narrative performance, Mansfield apes and challenges both narrative structure and social structure. In ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’, a naive young couple find themselves forced, by circumstances of convention and nature, to play out roles to each other; the story examines the fixed structures of response, which leave the man hopeless, the woman surreal with laughter, and both with what they really want far beyond the having. The woman’s helpless laughter in this story of people trapped not just by the fixed ritual of gender relations but by the fixed ritual of the story of their own marriage, the very story they inhabit, epitomises the laughter, the observational comedy, the force of hopeless, hopeful, surreal anarchy that runs through all of Mansfield’s work.

Virginia Woolf, in her more rivalrous moments, dismissed Mansfield to herself for her ‘cheap’ realism, the ABC tea-shop, waitress-peopled, downmarket settings of her stories. But Mansfield’s aesthetic question was the same as Woolf’s own. What was reality? Who were the judges of it? As early as 1909 she was pondering structure, and the ways in which meaning is expressed in fiction. ‘Realism, flesh covered bones …’ But then – ‘supposing ones bones were not bone but liquid light’. 25 Mansfield senses, in the very structures of things, a different kind of realism.

With that doubleness she displayed throughout her life and her work, the thing she most demanded of her own fiction and the fiction of others was that it be ‘true’. ‘Tell me! Tell me! Why is it so difficult to write simply – and not simply only but sotto voce, if you know what I mean? This is how I long to write. No fine effects – no bravura. But just the plain truth, as only a liar can tell it’, as her protagonist writes in ‘A Married Man’s Story’. This word ‘truth’ is irresistible to Mansfield; it preoccupies her in much of her writing about writing, and its meaning, and revelations of unexpected truth, and the avoidance of truth, and truth that can’t be spoken out loud, or maybe even articulated at all, feature repeatedly in her fiction. ‘But the truth was – Oh, better not inquire what the truth was. Better not ask what it was that kept them going’ (‘Father and the Girls’). Part of her take on truth can be deduced from her repeated use of this kind of discursive narrative style, a style that suggests both inclusion and exclusion of a reader and suggests also that the narrative voice itself is expressing only one opinion, that there’s flexibility of interpretation here; notions of fixedness and fluidity are foregrounded by such a device. She also likes to drop a reader into the middle of things – as if we simply know the story. ‘And then, after six years, she saw him again’ (‘A Dill Pickle’). Many of her stories start on the word And, as if insisting on both their own partialness and their belonging in a larger world, a larger referential frame.

She is fond of dialogue – fond, structurally, of something that can pull two ways at once. She likes to place unexplained pieces of story next to each other to reverberate on their own terms (this device is at the heart of ‘Prelude’, and can be seen at its most basic in the undeveloped fragment ‘Second Violin’, where two seemingly unconnected stories will eventually, presumably, form a single story). A sentence like ‘“The death agony was dreadful,” she said brightly’, lets Mansfield mark the comic potential of one simple unit doing at least two things. Similarly she can work wonders with a single word, the word ‘bliss’, for example, which, by the end of the story whose title it is, has come to mean several things, including its obvious surface meaning, a satirisation of this, a reading of the word as its own opposite, and a whole new state of understanding involving both its original meaning, its mocked meaning and its opposite.

Her sentences are spick and span, clean rhythmic units. ‘Miss Anderson rustled, rustled about the house like a dead leaf.’ If she appreciates the truth of cliche, if she seems to court sentiment, her charm is barbed – she often twins what seems like charm with a certain mercilessness: if there’s a kitten’s tongue in a story, then the kitten will probably be a dead one (as in ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Francais’). The boys on the shore in ‘At the Bay’ ‘twinkled like spiders’; this is a typically surprising construction, where ‘twinkled’ is confounded by ‘spiders’, and the whole notion of spider is re-seen because of the verb.

She goes straight to the directly transcribed misheard word for another ‘truth’: a child hears the word emerald as nemeral; an old char lady knows a beetle is a beedle. Her stories are full of directly transcribed voices, even bits of song, as if overheard by a reader in the course of the story. Like this she renews language at every level.

‘Ive two “kick offs” in the writing game,’ she once wrote. ’One is joy – real joy – … something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath … the other “kick off” is … an extremely deep sense of hopelessness – of everything doomed to disaster – … a cry against corruption that is absolutely the nail on the head.