ABSTRACT
For some readers and scholars, it has long been a tradition to read Mansfield as clever, but also cruel, heartless and/or immoral. Some of this – often rather excessive – antagonism might be construed as an attempt to (over)compensate for John Middleton Murry’s one-sided, posthumous hagiographical construction of her personality, and by extension, her oeuvre. But the blame cannot be entirely laid at his door; such views preceded Mansfield’s death and Murry’s subsequent public glorification of her, especially with respect to her stories about lonely, unmarried women, such as ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, which some early readers, to Mansfield’s dismay, read as a tasteless mockery of two vulnerable characters. Although recent scholarship on Mansfield offers a much more balanced view of her writing, there are still avenues to be explored concerning the understanding and compassion which arguably underpin all Mansfield’s mature works.
This essay considers the case of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and offers an interpretation of the story itself, as well as of Mansfield’s recorded reactions to its reception, in the light of her reading of Jane Austen’s Emma, and especially of her repeatedly expressed admiration for its male protagonist, Mr Knightley. It argues that his brand of landlordship and the Box Hill incident’s various implications are reflected in Mansfield’s frequent treatment of the theme of spinsterhood, as well as in her position concerning the moral responsibilities of a writer in depicting vulnerable characters.
