SOURCE: McFall, Gardner. “Poetry and Performance in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Bliss.’” In Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, edited by Rhoda B. Nathan, pp. 140-50. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993.

In the following essay, McFall contends that Mansfield's “concision, mobilization of imagery and rhythm, irony, ambiguity, and submerged lyric voice” necessitate that readers afford “Bliss” the attention usually reserved for poems.

Oh, to be a writer, a real writer given up to it and to it alone! … There are moments when Dickens is possessed by this power of writing: he is carried away. That is bliss.

Katherine Mansfield, 1920 (Journal [Journal of Katherine Mansfield], 203)

“Bliss” exemplifies Mansfield's mature fiction shaped by her lyric impulse and her mastery of poetic tradition squaring with the circumstances of her life. Here, her concision, mobilization of imagery and rhythm, irony, ambiguity, and submerged lyric voice require that we read the story with the kind...