SOURCE: “Genesis of a Short Story,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 1, January, 1955, pp. 91-6.

In the following essay, Wright calls upon to Mansfield's letters and journals to strengthen her assertion that the fly is a symbol for the author herself while the boss represents her father.

On January 11, 1918, after a wartime train trip to the South of France for her health, Katherine Mansfield wrote her husband, John Middleton Murry, that she felt “like a fly who has been dropped into the milk-jug and fished out again, but is still too milky and drowned to start cleaning up yet.”¹ As early as 1913 her story “Violet”² had idealized a “tender and brooding woman” lifting a small green fly from a milk glass and talking about Saint Francis. These passages prefigure one of her best-known stories, “The Fly,” wherein the Boss rescues a fly from the inkwell but then, as it...