The Wind Blows (short story)
The Wind Blows is a short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in the magazine Signature (4 October 1915) as “Autumns: II” under the pseudonym Matilda Berry. It was published in revised form in the Athenaeum on 27 August 1920, and subsequently reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories.[1]
Plot summary
Matilda is woken up by the wind; she looks out the window; her mother fetches some flowers from the garden and is called back inside for the telephone. Matilda is off to Mr Bullen's for her music lesson. Her mom does not want her to go due to the strong wind, but she goes anyway. After the lesson, she goes for a walk with her brother to the esplanade. Here, the story changes from present to past narrative as Mansfield shows that the music lesson, the walk etc. all occurred in Matilda's past, and she and her brother are actually sailing away on board a ship several years down the line, that all that went before were memories.
Characters
- Marie Swainson
- Bogey
- Matilda
- Mr Bullen,
Major themes
- Isolation
Literary significance
The text is written in the modernist mode, without a set structure, and with many shifts in the narrative.
References to other works
- Beethoven, Edward Alexander MacDowell and Anton Grigorovich Rubinstein are mentioned.
- Marie misquotes Percy Shelley's poem The Clouds.
Footnotes
- Vincent O’Sullivan (editor), Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories, Norton Critically Edition , explanatory notes