Mansfield's Literary Contexts

In a novel of 1891 the following observation is made:

Initial scrutiny might suggest that this passage is from a British novel yet in fact it belongs to a version of the colonial genre. Among the clues is the misleading assertion that town and country, cultivated interiors, social manners and landscapes, are successfully recreated. However, the tone of the novel from which the quotation is taken, Dugald Ferguson's Vicissitudes of Bush Life in Australia and New Zealand (1891), suggests that we could indeed be far from ‘home’, that is, England. Looking at the novels of empire, particularly those of the nineteenth-century social diaspora, we might well question what are the assumptions in fictional representations of the new society when ‘place’ does not quite exist. What embryonic symbols will emerge, when, despite assurances of sameness, of a presumed close accord and continuity with Britain, a sense of the incomplete nonetheless continues to persist instead? If the condition of expatriation affects the nineteenth-century colonist, how will Mansfield, writing in the twentieth century as an expatriate author and modernist, be affected as she looks back to the same society as the country of her birth?