On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present – a surprise – something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.
But to-day she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room – her room like a cupboard – and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
Mansfield’s Miss Brill loses faith in the fragile coordinates of her world at the end of her eponymous story and displaces her own grief onto her favourite fur. The fragility of this displacement communicates the collapse of the fictions created by Mansfield’s heroine in order to survive her own solitary life. We all need our fictions to ward off the inescapable singularity of the human condition. Her room has become a ‘cupboard’ a short step away we feel from a coffin and she lays to rest her fur as a precursor perhaps to her own mortality. If she cannot admit directly, her overriding upset at the destruction of her fanciful fictions, then the reader is left with no doubt that Miss Brill’s future will be profoundly arid without the safety net of her whimsical ‘bubble’ of unreality. The story does not end dramatically, it seems to end mid-expression, broken words for a lost soul.