Feminist critic Ruth Parkin-Gounelas has classified feminine features in Katherine Mansfield's writing, including the use of tag questions, which indicate a need for external reinforcement, frequent underlining, capitalisation and italics, which indicate repeated emphases, and ‘diminutive vocabulary’. I would add that Mansfield's recurrent use of colour and visual imagery throughout her stories and written correspondence is likewise a stereotypically feminine feature. But Mansfield employs both her gendered writing style and use of colour to subvert normative patriarchal parameters. In a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, we see this counterintuitive process of using accepted female gender norms to subvert patriarchy paradoxically, not only in her writing, but in her actions as well. Mansfield is angry at Murry but she employs ‘mock-feminine deferral to masculine authority’ to prove a point. She writes:

In this short excerpt, Mansfield uses the previously described features of female writing along with the gender-charged trope of pink wool to resist systemic expectations of femininity. Parkin-Gounelas writes of the wool, ‘The color is of course part of a system whereby gender polarization is encoded from the cradle. As Mansfield sees it, her collusion in this process is as conspicuous as is the male's oblivion of it’. Thus, the pink wool acts as a symbol of this larger situation. With the piece of pink wool that she places on his head, Mansfield uses something from within the female system to undermine him, and Murry remains unaware.

Mansfield's fiction performs this same process of resisting, while working within, the gender system. In ‘The Little Governess’ (1915), Mansfield employs a feminine writing style, especially in her repeated use of colour. By aligning the gender-marked colours of pink and blue with varying levels of male and female space and with varying levels of safety and danger, she makes a statement about the victimisation of women.