Two possible antecedents for these stories come from different periods of literature: Theocritus and T. S. Eliot.

Mansfield used the XVth idyll of Theocritus as a model for a piece on the Coronation of George V that appeared in New Age in 1911. As T. O. Beachcroft notes in The Modest Art, this idyll "comes as near to a modern short story as anything in the world . . . the mime form gets rid of the need to prove the authority of the narrator." Characters are revealed through dialogue with no "comment, explanation, and moralizing" from an intrusive narrator. This form was well-suited to "scenes from everyday life." In both subject and method, "Prelude" and "At the Bay" can be compared with the XVth idyll of Theocritus.

According to Anthony Alpers, when T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" first appeared in 1917, Mansfield read it out loud...