SOURCE: “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly,’” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 3, July, 1962, pp. 338-41.

In the following essay, a response to F. W. Bateson's and B. Shahevitch's 1961 essay on “The Fly,” Copland complains that those critics miss the basic point the story, which he says is “less about a man's personality than about a man's crisis.”

It was disappointing to discover that Mr. Bateson and Mr. Shahevitch had applied but not really employed their valuable techniques in criticising Katherine Mansfield's short story “The Fly” (Essays in Criticism, January 1962). It seems a pity that the authors' method should reveal so much of the artist's method while casting so little light upon her effects:

Early in the story we had quite liked the boss, then we discovered that we detested him and now we can merely despise him.

This is a lamentably naïve conclusion. But then throughout the exercise...