Millie (short Story)
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"Millie" is a
1913 Events January * January 5 – First Balkan War: Battle of Lemnos (1913), Battle of Lemnos – Greek admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis forces the Turkish fleet to retreat to its base within the Dardanelles, from which it will not ven ...
short story by
Katherine Mansfield Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) was a New Zealand writer, essayist and journalist, widely considered one of the most influential and important authors of the modernist movement. Her works are celebra ...
. It was first published in '' The Blue Review'' in June 1913,Katherine Mansfield, ''Selected Stories'', Oxford World's Classics, explanatory notes and was republished in '' Something Childish and Other Stories'' (1924).


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.


References


External links


Text version of Millie
hosted by the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection Modernist short stories 1913 short stories Short stories by Katherine Mansfield Works originally published in Rhythm (literary magazine) {{1910s-story-stub