The Daughters Of The Late Colonel

By Katherine Mansfield

1921

First Published

3.38

Average Rating

Number of Pages

1H20M

Audio Length

The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, published in 1922. The story is about two sisters, Josephine and Constantia, who are struggling to come to terms with the death of their father, the late Colonel. They are both unmarried and have lived with their father for their entire lives, and now that he is gone, they must learn to live on their own.The story is set in the sisters' home, where they are sorting through their father's belongings and trying to decide what to do with them. They are also dealing with the aftermath of their father's death, including the arrival of their brother, who is eager to take control of the family's affairs.As the story progresses, the sisters begin to realize that they have lived their entire lives in their father's shadow, and that they have never really been able to make their own decisions. They also begin to see the flaws in their father's character, and to question the values that he instilled in them.The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a poignant and insightful exploration of grief, family relationships, and the struggle for independence. Mansfield's writing is spare and understated, but she manages to convey a great deal of emotion and depth through the subtle interactions between the characters. The story is a powerful reminder of the importance of living life on one's own terms, and of the need to break free from the constraints of tradition and convention.Father would never forgive them. That was what they felt more than ever when, two mornings later, they went into his room to go through his things. They had discussed it quite calmly. It was even down on Josephine's list of things to be done. Go through father's things and settle about them. But that was a very different matter from saying after breakfast.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Avg Rating

3.38

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3 STARS

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2 STARS

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1 STARS

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Author

Katherine Mansfield

Author · 79 books

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including "Miss Brill", "Prelude", "The Garden Party", "The Doll's House", and later works such as "The Fly", are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. Katherine Mansfield was part of a "new dawn" in English literature with T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world. Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work. Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. The stories are innovative in many other ways. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily. Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes. Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Suggestion and implication replace direct detail.