"Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield is the story of an English tutor's trip to the Public Garden to hear a band perform. It was written in 1922 and is set in the nineteenth century. The story details the inner thoughts of Miss Brill as well as the conversations of those around her.
             Mansfield weaves the story of Miss Brill in such a way that though the story only takes place over a few hours in a single day, the reader is able to derive much about Miss Brill's life. The reader is able to infer that Miss Brill is single, childless, and that this excursion to hear the band is one of seldom few highlights in her week. Without the role of wife and mother, typical in this time period, Miss Brill must give herself another context, that of actress, in order to escape the realization of her vast loneliness; Mansfield accomplishes this theme through the use of character, point of view, and setting.
             The author defines seven fictional representatives of people in the story - two round characters and several flat characters -- through Miss Brill's thoughts. Miss Brill herself and her fur are the more developed round characters. Right away, the reader learns that Miss Brill loves her fur and is quite excited to be wearing it on her excursion. In fact, Miss Brill gives her inanimate fur feelings and thoughts within the first paragraph of the story and the fur is ultimately the reader's gateway into the true desperation that Miss Brill feels. The character use of the fur, which is not only an animal, but a dead animal, as Miss Brill's closest companion illustrates immediately that this is a very lonely woman. This is further illustrated by Miss Brill's thoughts of the others in her life. She is only able to name her English students and the invalid gentleman as people with whom she has any true interaction, and her role with these people is scripted. The other characters that she encounters in the gardens are all more than peripheral...