Increasingly towards the end of her short, interrupted life and as the inevitability of her early death becomes a less and less resistible conclusion, Mansfield's fictions are characterized by a sense of impermanence, of the temporary, by what Vincent O'Sullivan describes as a ‘flickering of mood and atmosphere’ that ‘prevents any feeling or perspective from lasting more than a short time’ (CR 139). While Mansfield's recognition of the brevity of life – of her life – may be one dimension of this concern with impermanence, it is also, necessarily, an aspect of her chosen form, the short story, a form that is characterized by interruption, by a breaking-off or closing-down before an end can be reached, before closure is established, or by a closing-off too early, by the banality of a ‘twist in the tale’. The strangeness – the queerness – of Mansfield's fictions concerns, not least, the strangeness of ending, of conclusion, of closure. In many of Mansfield's stories, the end comes at a moment of revelation, at a moment when a character is finally able to come to understand or to express a certain truth. And yet, characteristically, these moments are undercut so that they ‘just ’ do not occur. ‘The Garden Party’, for example, ends with Laura's sense that, after the success of her garden party and after confronting the dead man from the nearby workers’ cottages, she has understood something: ’ “Isn't life”, she stammered, “isn't life – ‘’ But what life was she couldn't explain’ (SS 349). ‘Bliss’ ends by selfconsciously questioning closure, expressing uncertainty about the future, about what is going to happen now, at the end of the story, as if the end of the story may not be the end (’ “Oh, what is going to happen now?” she cried’, is the penultimate sentence (SS 185)). Similarly, in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, both daughters experience a certain revelation concerning the relation between the ‘other life’ of helping and placating their father, on the one hand, and on the other, those times when, as Constantia thinks, ‘she really felt herself’. But this revelation leads only to questions – ‘What did it mean? What was it she was always wanting? What did it all lead to?