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Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield

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“Miss Brill” is a short story published in 1922, in which Katherine Mansfield, the author gives great insight into how isolated individuals can begin to twist their perception of the world around them, eventually leading them to unintentionally contradict their loneliness and causing their false perception of the world to collapse and become estranged. Miss Brill, the main character is a middle-aged, unmarried English teacher who lives by herself in an apartment in France. Miss Brill owns a treasured fur which she wears around her neck every Sundays at three o’clock when she goes to the park. The lonely foreigner strolls around the park and has become quite an expert at eavesdropping on other people’s conversations while creating artificial connections or relationships with the people around her. The short story focuses on one particular Sunday afternoon where Miss Brill is forced to step out of her delusions and face reality after her illusions were shattered by the remarks of a young couple. In the story Katherine Mansfield uses conscious narrative to allow readers to know so much about the main character through the main character’s thoughts and perception of other characters. By doing this, the readers get a complete characterization of Miss Brill, the main character through the responses and emotions that result from other character’s conversations or actions. A good example of that would be when Miss Brill suddenly realized that the people who sat at the bench next to her all seemed odd, silent and old which ironically reflects on her situation although she does not see it at them time. According to short stories for students, “Miss Brill" is told in a third-person, stream of consciousness narrative, a common device in Mansfield’s works which serves to heighten the story’s psychological acuity and perceptive characterization. Though narrative is in third person, the stream of consciousness technique allows the r

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