More on "The Daughters of the Late Colonel"

Josephine compares "that queer
 little crying noise" inside her to the yeeping
of sparrows on the window ledge. Photo by fs-phil, 

Last Monday evening, 18 members of our group, under COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, participated in a Zoom videoconference on Katherine Mansfield's short story, "The Daughters of the Late Colonel."  In the final section of the story, an organ grinder starts playing music outside the window of the residence of the two sisters, Josephine and Constantia.  Josephine's immediate reaction is to pay the organ grinder to make him stop because their late father disliked the music, however the sisters then jointly remember it doesn't matter anymore.  Their father will never again thump his cane in anger.

Constantia goes into an extended reverie in front of her "favorite Buddha" on the mantelpiece. She contemplates the sunlight on the carpet. She thinks about her mother's death many years earlier and the sisters' inability ever to meet eligible men.  Her thoughts turn speculative, "It was only when she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight or by the sea or into a thunderstorm that she felt herself.  What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to?  Now? Now?"  At the very end of the story, "she stared at a big cloud where the sun had been."

Many thanks to our group member of long-standing, Peter McGullam, for calling to my attention some comments Mansfield made about the story in a letter to the writer William Gerhardi:

"All was meant, of  course, to lead us to that last paragraph, when my two flowerless ones turned with that timid gesture, to the sun.  Perhaps now.  And after that, it seemed to me, they died as truly as father was dead." (1)

In other words, Mansfield's feelings about her characters is that their effective quarantine, whether imposed by their father or themselves, wouldn't end.

(1) "An Introduction to Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories," by Stephanie Forward.  Posted on the British Library's website.