Robert Peltier is an English instructor at Trinity College and has published works of both fiction andnonfiction. In the following essay, he provides a general overview of Mansfield's "Miss Brill."

Katherine Mansfield, bora Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, lived a short life, but she established a literary reputation at a young age. Her first published book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911, when she was only twenty-two years old. She became friends with some of the great literary figures of her day, including D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, and married the writer and critic J. Middleton Murry.

Her stories are full of detail and small, albeit significant, incidents in her characters' lives. In an often-quoted letter published in The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, she says of "Miss Brill": "I chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her, and to...