In the following essay, Magalaner examines the autobiographical elements in Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss."

Since the death of Katherine Mansfield more than fifty years ago, the kind of attention her short stories have received has followed an understandably meandering path. Shocked by the romantic aura of her early demise - in France, no less, of a sudden consumptive attack, almost in the presence of her husband, and hardly out of her twenties - critics could scarcely be blamed for accentuating the sorrow and the pity of her end and for seeking in her stories clues to the real Mansfield not available in the scattered biographical writings of friends and relatives. In the United States, Sylvia Berkman's serious examination of Mansfield's writings marked the beginning of a new and scholarly approach to Mansfield's fiction. The short stories lent themselves admirably to sensitive interpretation according to the rules of the...