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Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” portrays an afternoon in the tragic existence of its solitary protagonist, who lives in a world that isolates those on the margins of society. Miss Brill is an aging outsider denying her alienation by vicariously inserting herself into the lives of others until she is forced to recognize the truth. As the story develops, Mansfield’s third-person narrator reveals this truth gradually, heightening its impact.
The story begins in medias res, foregoing traditional exposition. Little is said about characters, conflict, or setting. Instead, readers know only that Miss Brill is in a French park on a chilly day, wearing a fur stole. The first hints of the conflict emerge through flashback. Miss Brill recalls removing the fur from its box. She is fond of the fur, treating it like a living thing, as if it’s been a lifelong companion. She calls it “dear little thing” and “little rogue,” yet she recognizes that it is worn. Its eyes need polishing and its nose needs repair. The condition of the fur, brought out for only one season each year, suggests the conflict: Miss Brill has yet to recognize that her own condition, aging and confined, is mirrored by the fur’s.
Miss Brill is lonely and desires the intimacy of companionship. Every Sunday, she goes to the park to watch people and listen in on conversations. This particular Sunday is “brilliantly fine,” although Miss Brill senses a chill in the air. This chill foreshadows revelations about her own identity, truths that she will face about aging and social exclusion. Autumn is beginning, and more people are out and about. The band, she thinks, is playing “louder and gayer” than in the off-season. In that season, she imagines, when the band plays for regulars—like Miss Brill—they play for people who are like family.
As the rising action develops, the narrator notes that a silent, elderly couple shares Miss Brill’s “special” seat. This disappoints her because she likes to listen in on people’s conversations, “sitting in on other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked around her.” Their silence denies her the connection she seeks, so she observes the activity in the park. Adults stroll and talk, and children play. The people who sit on the benches and chairs, however, are “odd, silent, and nearly all old.” Happily or delusionally unaware of the fact that she too sits silently on a bench, Miss Brill continues to watch people, disconnected, sidelined, and tragically excluded.
Her attention is caught by events around her, each of which emphasizes relationships among people in the park. Couples parade by, a beautiful woman throws a bouquet of violets away, and a woman referred to as the “ermine toque” approaches a gentleman. The woman, Miss Brill notes, wears a hat that has grown shabby over the years, something she bought when she was still blonde. Like the hat, the woman is old and shabby now, a symbolic echo of Miss Brill and her fur. The gentleman, despite the woman’s delight at meeting him, blows cigarette smoke in her face and walks away. Failing to recognize her similarities to this woman, Miss Brill lets her attention drift.
As the story’s climax approaches, Miss Brill continues to deny her alienation, age, and longing. She has a revelation, feeling that the activity in the park is like a play. She imagines that she’s not simply an audience member, but also an actor, a participant in what she sees. She even imagines that people would have noticed her absence. Miss Brill does not want to be an outsider, one of the odd, old people watching life’s drama on the sidelines. She wants to belong. When she envisions everyone in the park singing together, a grand unified chorus that pulls people up from the benches to join in, her eyes fill with tears. Still, as she tells herself that the group shares an understanding, she cannot identify what that understanding might be. Even in fantasy, she remains an outsider.
At the narrative’s climax, Miss Brill is driven to admit her own tragic condition, prompted by youthful contempt for the aging. In Miss Brill’s mind, the young lovers who join her on the bench are participants in the play in which she imagines herself. She fantasizes that they are the hero and heroine in events in which she participates, yet they quickly destroy that fantasy. The boy calls her a “stupid old thing” and asks rhetorically who would want her. The girl mocks the fur Miss Brill dearly loves. Miss Brill can no longer deny her alienation and exclusion from life around her.
Wounded deeply, as the story’s brief falling action reveals, Miss Brill retreats to her apartment. She returns, an aging outsider, to her dark and claustrophobic room—the tragic fate she envisioned for the old people in the park. Without looking at her once-treasured fur, she returns it to its dark, lonely box, imagining that she hears “something” crying. The fur’s supposed tears really reflect those of Miss Brill, brought on by her exclusion from the world she so longed to join. Miss Brill has accepted the truth of her lonely condition, as terrible as it might be.
