No! no! Better far to be blown over the earth like the husk, like the withered pod that the wind carries and drops and bears aloft again.’ (‘Father and the Girls’). Mansfield’s own existence was habitually far from fixed; in an average year she would change addresses several times in the one city or town. Lorna Sage even goes so far as to suggest that the short story form was the one place she ‘felt at home … being so little at home anywhere else. 31’

England proved the useful opposite of a home, one that repayed fruitfully in her stories what it withheld in terms of her own personal belonging. The sheer toughness of the early New Zealand stories like ‘Millie’ and ‘The Woman at the Store’ is remarkable compared to the light, bantering mode she used for the stories in In a German Pension narrated by the insider/outsider, ‘the little stranger in our midst’, purporting to be ‘English’. A combination of this toughness and that lightness creates the ‘special prose’ she aspired to, which makes the later stories, many set in New Zealand, so ‘strange’ and original in themselves – written from both the centre and the margins of literary tradition and geographical place. 32

Strangeness also suited Mansfield’s ‘lawless’ nature: ‘I, a woman, with the taint of the pioneer in my blood’, 33 is how she saw herself in an early poem. To be both a woman and a pioneer, to feel, as Angela Carter suggests, colonial and colonialised at once – this allowed her to write stories which critiqued not just geographical or psychological notions of belonging and exclusion, but notions of gender and literature too.

Often, a Mansfield story will refer to itself as a piece of writing; ‘that’s rather nice, don’t you think,’ as the seedy, jaded protagonist of ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Francais’ says about his own phrase-making. Her stories about writers are among her wittiest, and ‘The Advanced Lady’ is one of her early critiques of fiction itself. What can it mean, it asks, to be an advanced lady – and an advanced writer? The story anatomises preconceptions about women, which are held and encouraged by both women and men. It argues back with what women are ‘supposed’ to feel. It goes out of its way to show how simple truth works against philosophical or sentimental lies or hopes. The story is about a group of people who set off on a journey they’re simply not going to be able to make because of stubborn blindness about themselves. In the course of the journey there and back, its ‘advanced lady’ writer is lampooned; she is writing a book whose style and themes the quippy, wickedly funny narrator (and the writer) actually intends to challenge, dismember and remake – as something new, not ‘old as the hills’.

Because she destroyed all her personal papers from the years of its publication and just before, it is impossible to know whether Mansfield herself arranged the order of the stories for In A German Pension. But if she did (and it’s probable that she did), the two stories which follow, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum’ and ‘A Blaze’, studies of love as a kind of bargaining, or performance, or amorality, perhaps form what Mansfield believed the writer who happened to be a woman should, instead, be writing. In fact this is a steady theme in the first collection, whose general critique of the social and sexual oppression of girls and women would echo through all her future work.

Where lesser writers might get caught up in the politics and sentiments of protest, Mansfield deals directly in the immediacy of voice, and lack of voice. The question at the centre of ‘Life of Ma Parker’ is one very much about life. It begins with a ‘literary gentleman’ as its subject, in other words, the usual inhabitant of a story, then shifts to his cleaner, who spends her day mopping up the mess the literary gentleman mundanely makes. Ma Parker, born in Stratford, has never heard of Shakespeare (and if Woolf can be credited with inventing the concept of Shakespeare’s sister, Mansfield would have known what to do with the concept of Shakespeare’s charlady). Where death is the overt theme of this ‘life’, Mansfield’s covert theme is fiction itself and the inability of any literary ‘life’ in dealing with or even empathising with this woman’s life. The woman’s grandson has just died. The literary gentleman is inept, then embarrassed, then blandly pitiless. The woman cleans the flat, then leaves. She is filled with the need simply to be sad, out loud, for a rough life and its losses, but there’s no place in which she can do this simple thing. ‘Oh, wasn’t there anywhere where she could hide and keep herself to herself and stay as long as she liked, not disturbing anybody, and nobody worrying her? Wasn’t there anywhere in the world where she could have her cry out – at last?’

The story gets close to Dickensian melodrama; its closeness to this is purposeful and its avoidance of mawkishness is a miracle. It avoids it by sentences so strange, so astonishing, that the emphasis shifts. The dying child has no means to comment on his own life, or death. Because he is dying of ‘a great lump of something bubbling in his chest’, he can hardly breathe, never mind speak. ‘But what was more awful than all was when he didn’t cough he sat against the pillow and never spoke or answered, or even made as if he heard. Only he looked offended.’

‘Life of Ma Parker’ coalesces round the impassivity of this unexpected word: ‘offended’.