Bliss, K. Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield

Beauchamp Murry

1888, Wellington, New Zealand

1923, Fontainebleau, France

Prominent modernist writer of short fiction

Bliss

… What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?...

Oh, is there no way you can express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’? How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?...

It was dusky in the dining-room and quite chilly. But all the same Bertha threw off her coat; she could not bear the tight clasp of it another moment, and the cold air fell on her arms.

But in her bosom there was still that bright glowing place – that shower of little sparks coming from it. It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror – but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips,, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something… divine to happen… that she knew must happen… infallibly…

Oh, why did she feel so tender towards the whole world tonight? Everything was good – was right.  All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss…

For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband.

Oh, she’d love him – she’d been in love with him, of course, in every other way, but just not in that way. And, equally, of course, she’d understood that he was different. They’d discuss it so often. It had worried her dreadfully at first to find that she was so cold, but after a time it had not seemed to matter. They were so frank to each other – such good pals. That was the best of being modern.

But now ardently! Ardently! The word ached in her ardent body! Was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to? But then, then - …

Actress Kate Elliott,
in 2011 she starred as Katherine Mansfield
in tele-movie Bliss