Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses the characters' attributes in "Marriage á la Mode."

Despite her early death at age thirty-four, Katherine Mansfield produced a prodigious body of work, one which continues to bring her acclaim to the present day. She first came to the public eye with her "New Zealand" stories—stories that drew on her childhood. The American writer Willa Cather wrote in her discussion of contemporary writers, "To my thinking, she never measured herself up so fully as in the two remarkable stories about an English family in New Zealand, "Prelude" and "At the Bay." But Mansfield lived out her adult life in Europe—in England and on the Continent—and her connections there brought her into close contact with...