Psychology (short story)

This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Psychology" short story – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

"Psychology" is a 1920 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in Bliss and Other Stories.^[1]

A man visits a woman for tea. He tells her this is the only place he pays attention to in terms of its furniture and so on. He also loves her 'little boy'. They then talk about the state of the novel as a literary genre - coming to the conclusion that the psycho-novel is shoddy. She feels anguished about possibly having failed in not following suit with that genre however, and he leaves. He rings the bell, then a friend of hers comes along and whilst she would usually be annoyed by her, this time she puts her arm around her and entices her to come again soon. She then sets out writing about how she liked the talk on psychology with her friend.

Characters

female playwright male novelist the playwright's friend' an elderly virgin, a pathetic creature who simply idolized her

• friendship
• literary genres, particularly trends for novels, and the psychology-novel.
• Unspoken of/Hidden Love

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

• Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is alluded to through the phrase, 'a sandwich from the hatter's bag', i.e. Mad Hatter.^[2]
• The Book of Genesis is also alluded to concerning a rich cake that the female playwright serves.^[3]

• Full Text

This article about a short story (or stories) published in the 1920s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e