Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill

The story “ Miss Brill By Katherine Mansfield ” is based off of the rather lonely life of an elderly English woman in Paris whom makes a living as an English tutor for young children and also reads to invalids. Miss Brills life is quite dull and dreary, as only a limited amount of things bring joy to her. The main ones are displayed throughout the story as her fur coat, and her ritual every Sunday in the Jardins Publique where she listens and watches the people around her to try and relieve her of the isolation she feels.

Every Sunday Miss Brill will pull out her fur coat, dust it off and goes to the Jardins Publique for the weekly concert they hold. While at Jardins Publique, she listens and watches the lives of the surrounding people as it helps her cope with her loneliness. “How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play.” the so called “play” in the park intrigues her while also aiding her in dealing with her loneliness as it provides her with the opportunity to escape “ the little dark room” where she lives and surround herself by the company of other individual's. Also Miss Brill taking the coat out and brushing it “rubbed the life back …show more content…
the first example is when she first gets in her “special seat” and treats her coat as if it was a pet "she could have taken it off and laid it on her lap and stroked it." this suggests that she doesn’t see aspects of life as they really are. Another suggestion that she alters her perception of life is when she observes the elderly couple that share the bench with her. "were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms." while Miss Brill comes to this conclusion she completely ignores the fact that she herself sits there silently and watches the lives of everyone around her in an odd