Not a protest – a cry, and I mean corruption in the widest sense of the word, of course’. 26

This twinned impetus, the linked expression of joy and grief, is maybe why she can deliver the weight of mortality with such lightness – with the unexpected nimbleness, say, of the grandmother in the fine story ‘The Voyage’, a story whose revelation is first death, then an unexpected life beyond it. Similarly, Mansfield is expert at finding the surprise of sensuality in everyday ordinariness – a sense of hope, even of ecstasy, in mundane suburbia, its pavements and bicycles. She dazzles the ideal with the real, and vice versa. She uses language to suggest its limits, to suggest that which can’t be articulated, can’t be said. ‘Psychology’ is a cunning realization of the unsaid things in an English sitting room – and the unsaid things between selves – in a story which finally, wittily, sees the realization of these currents, all the shifts of feeling between the said and the unsaid, as the impetus for all truly ‘modern’ fiction.

When it came to her own likings in fiction, Mansfield wrote to Woolf paraphrasing Chekhov, a writer she revered. ‘What the writer does is not so much to solve the question but to put the question. There must be the question put. That seems to me a very nice dividing line between the true & the false writer’. 27 With open-endedness, and with repeated use of ellipses, she makes space in a story not just for questions but for unfixed things, and things as yet unthought — both by characters and by readers. Her stories are less about story and more about this shift in knowing or understanding – making the reader, between knowing and not knowing, part of the process of the story’s own performance.

This throws light on her treatment of the idea of a writer’s self, in which there’s also a repeated question of ellipsis, or elision, or space. ‘One must learn, one must practise to forget oneself,’ the writer, whose many selves have always fascinated critics, stated. ‘I can’t tell the truth about Aunt Anne unless I am free to enter into her life without selfconsciousness’. 28

Mansfield’s selflessness, her gift of authorial flexibility, granted her a democratic sense of hearing, with which on the one hand she hears language and voice in people who’ve routinely been denied literary language and voice (like servants, children, old people) and on the other gives voice to birds, trees, even inanimate things like lifts, or trains. Her characters and fictional environments are brought to a particular kind of intense life in this way. The opening paragraph of ‘At The Bay’, for instance, is full of such intense life – and at the same time full of a repeated articulation of denial. ‘Not yet.’ ‘Hidden.’ ‘Could not see.’ ‘Gone.’ ‘Was nothing to mark.’ ‘Just did not fall.’ What is being denied here, in this edgy mock-pastoral start to the day, where absence is such a strong presence? A close look and listen reveals the voices of things we don’t expect to have voice — the sea, the stream, a dog, a cat. The story begins on a revelation of something withheld and, at the same time, a different kind of consciousness. Its most pressing question, as it passes into its second section, becomes how to live, how to survive in the swim of things. Do you stay complete and uptight and individual, controlling all you can? Or do you do better to give yourself over to the very nature of things, ‘carelessly, recklessly, spending oneself? After the refrains of its first two sections – one peopled, one not – we experience the social microcosm of the visitors at the bay in a close examination of what they’re each keeping, as it were, at bay — the gender battles, the battles within the various selves that make each and every individual self, and the life-and-death matter of the brevity of things, ‘the shortness of life!’ – all held in the frame of the story’s single day.

This is as close as Mansfield gets to an interest in closure. The natural cycle, the frosted flower, the (Romantic) notion of brevity, the promised anticlimactic fall which infects life and narrative regardless (since all stories and all books, like all lives, have endings) make sense of her love of held, timeless moments glowing back against chronology, and the attraction, for her, of stories which celebrate life in the face of the fact that neither story nor life lasts. This is maybe why she is passionate about beginnings, stories set in spring, stories which hymn nature’s own anarchy of rebirth, or (famously in that story all about beginnings, ‘Prelude’) stories from a child’s-eye-view.

Child consciousness is one way she shifts or renews perception, avoids preconception. Another is by returning, again and again, to the concept of foreignness. Her stories are peopled by characters living a travelling, hotel, rented-room existence, coming to understand their own strangeness – or, like the foolish solipsist girl in ‘The Little Governess’, not understanding it well enough.

Mansfield’s own ‘foreignness’ meant several things. It made her always a stranger in England and Europe, ‘the little colonial’. 29 It allowed her to see the self as a traveller in the strange country of its own many selves. Around 1920, satirising the fashions for self-analysis and literary memoir, and mocking the hackneyed fashionability of Shakespeare’s phrase ‘to thine own self be true’ she wrote a note to herself: ‘True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well, really, thats what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves. For what with complexes and suppressions, and reactions and vibrations and reflections – there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.’ She longs for freedom from all bonds of self, she suggests here – ‘the moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal’. 30

Possibly the habit of homelessness is even a definition of liberation in this light – another chance to go beyond self altogether. ‘Home! To sit around, doing nothing, listening to the clock, counting up the years, thinking back … thinking! To stay fixed in one place as if waiting for something or somebody.