Kloepfer is an editorial consultant and author of The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H. D. In the following excerpt, she gives an overview of Bates's "The Daffodil Sky," focusing in particular on the theme of appearance and reality.

The story collection The Daffodil Sky has been called the crowning achievement of H. E. Bates's later years; the title story both exhibits the hallmarks of his earlier writing and is colored by an increasing maturity, a sensibility altered by World War II, and a recognition of the inescapableness of time's passage.

Like many of Bates's stories, "The Daffodil Sky" is highly charged visually, marked by "the direct pictorial contact between eye and object, between object and reader," which Bates admired in Hemingway and discussed in The Modern Short Story: A Critical Survey. In the first few paragraphs alone, Bates evokes a spectrum of colors...