Miss Brill’s Lament
JESSICA WHYTE, runner-up in the 2017 Feature Writing Competition, recommends ‘Miss Brill’ by Katherine Mansfield: ‘Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Miss Brill’ was written to be read out loud. In early 1921, shortly after the story was first published in the magazine The Athenaeum, Katherine Mansfield wrote to her brother-in-law Richard Murry: ‘after I’d written it, I read it aloud – numbers of times – just as one would play over a musical composition, trying to get it nearer and nearer to the expression of Miss Brill – until it fitted her…’
