ABSTRACT
Katherine Mansfield's work displays just how important she considered "make-believe" and playing to be. Even her early stories, which are, significantly, mostly about children, offer a vast array of instances of play. Many of them are the universal games that children play all over the world: tag, hide and seek, making mud-pies, and playing with train-engines or at pirates. However, the way Mansfield depicts these individuals with what is now commonly referred to as "Peter Pan Syndrome" does not suggest that she considers play an undesirable holdover from childhood. Adults' regulation of children's play and its ramifications reappear in other Mansfield stories. She shows different degrees of control: from parents providing practically no supervision and giving full freedom to play to enforcing an almost military-like management of every moment of a child's playtime. Sometimes the absence of play in Mansfield's stories is equally as important as its presence.
