<![CDATA[Katherine Mansfield’s short fiction is frequently associated with psychological subtlety, modernist experimentation, and the representation of women’s interior lives. Yet the social conditions that structure this interiority have received comparatively less sustained attention when class and gender are examined together across Mansfield’s fiction. This article investigates the intersection of social class and gender in three of Mansfield’s most widely discussed short stories: “The Garden Party,” “Bliss,” and “Miss Brill.” Drawing on feminist literary criticism, intersectional theory, and selected concepts from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural distinction, the article argues that Mansfield represents class and gender not as independent categories of experience but as mutually reinforcing structures that shape women’s identities, social relationships, emotional possibilities, and access to agency. Laura Sheridan’s encounter with working-class death in “The Garden Party” exposes the ideological limits of upper-middle-class femininity; Bertha Young’s apparently privileged domestic life in “Bliss” reveals how bourgeois comfort can coexist with gendered restrictions on sexual and emotional autonomy; and Miss Brill’s precarious social belonging demonstrates how gender, age, and economic marginality can converge to produce social invisibility. Across these stories, female agency is neither completely absent nor fully emancipatory. Rather, Mansfield constructs agency as partial, unstable, and negotiated within existing social structures. The comparative reading proposed here contributes to Mansfield scholarship by bringing together three different configurations of class and gender and demonstrating how social privilege and social marginality operate simultaneously within the author’s representation of female subjectivity.]]>
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