Women In Fiction

Author Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand in 1888 . Living only a brief thirty-four years , Mansfield died in France in 1923 . During her short career , Mansfield wrote stories that reflected the behaviors and psychological effects of the Victorian era on such s as women and class

It is Mansfield 's ability to look tap into the underlying feelings and thoughts of her characters that attracted me to her writing . In her stories , there is a simple realism that shines through in the imperfections of the individual characters . The stories don 't

always end happily but they end the only way they can , given the situation and more importantly , the people that are involved . I especially like her ability to focus the reader 's attention on the character 's awareness of the situation and not to draw outside conclusions . Instead , the character 's actions (or inaction ) speaks for itself

The her essay on Mansfield 's short story The Daughters of the Late Colonel ' Rosemary Canfield Reisman the theme of captivity and the various uses of imagery to illustrate the Pinner sisters awareness and fear of their newly found freedom . As Reisman notes , the world in which Josephine and Constantia have been prisoners had two objectives to avoid displeasing a testy old father and to stay out of his way Having lived their entire lives under the strong hand of their father his death leaves the two spinster sisters adrift in the world directed toward negatives rather than toward positives (Reisman...