Millie is a 1913 short story by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...

. It was first published in The Blue Review

The Blue Review

Rhythm was a literary, arts, and critical review magazine published in London, England from 1911 to 1913....

in June 1913.

Plot introduction

Mr Williamson has been murdered, supposedly by an English handyman. Millie's husband and several other men plan to avenge his death.

Plot summary

Millie is alone in her house, as her husband and the other men have gone to find Harrison, an English handyman who has supposedly killed Mr Williamson. After looking at her wedding pictures in Mount Cook, she hears a noise coming from the garden and finds a wounded man lying there. She offers him food and realises it is Harrison; she decides to feed him anyway when she sees how beleaguered he comes across. Millie sees that he is just a boy and that awakes a maternal instinct in her. She vows that he will go free.

The men later come home and have settled down from the night when they hear a noise outside. It is Harrison attempting to escape from his hiding place by riding Sid's horse. Immediately, they decide to chase him on foot. Millie's final, shrieked reaction to the pursuit is ambiguous; it is not clear whether she is gleeful at their futile attempt to catch Harrison, or whether she has had a change of heart and, in the heat of the moment, is spurring the hunters on.

Literary significance

The text is written in the modernist mode, without a set structure, and with many shifts in the narrative.