SOURCE: Norman, Colin. “Prufrock, Freud, and the Late Colonel's Daughters: New Light on the Genesis of a Mansfield Story.” English Studies in Canada 25 (1999): 19-37.

In the following essay, Norman identifies T. S. Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as an influence on Mansfield's“The Daughters of the Late Colonel.”

Less than five months before her death in 1923, Katherine Mansfield wrote to Violet Schiff that Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is “by far by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem” (Murry, Letters [The Letters of Katherine Mansfield] 2: 240). “Prufrock” had impressed her from the start: soon after its publication in 1917, she echoed it in her journal: “Is that all? Can that be all? That is not what I meant at all” (Murry, Journal [Journal of Katherine Mansfield] 124). In a letter to Virginia Woolf of May 1919, she assessed it shrewdly...