In a letter dated 24 June 1922, Katherine Mansfield writes to an aspiring novelist Arnold Gibbons advising him on the stories that he has sent her for her comments. She tells Gibbons that his stories are ‘awfully good’ but that they don't ‘quite come off ’ because, she says, ‘you used more words than were necessary. There's a kind of diffuseness of expression,’ she continues, ‘which isn't natural to the English way of thinking’ (LKM ii. 220). And she contrasts Gibbons's ‘diffuseness’ with the elliptical compression of Chekhov – Gibbons's, as well as Mansfield's own literary model. Mansfield then cites some examples of this diffuseness – essentially a kind of loquacious and repetitive vapidity of expression – and comments that ‘When one writes like that in English it 's as though the nerve of the feeling were gone’. ‘I realise it 's all very well to say these things,’ continues Mansfield, as if talking to herself, ‘but how are we going to convey these overtones, half tones, quarter tones, these hesitations, doubts, beginnings, if we go at them directly. It is most devilishly difficult, but I do believe that there is a way of doing it and that 's by trying to get as near to the exact truth as possible’ (LKM ii. 221–2).

This chapter considers ways in which Mansfield's work is concerned with indirection and with the expression of the ‘truth’ of ‘overtones, half tones, quarter tones […] hesitations, doubts, beginnings’, with the representation of experiences, thoughts, emotions – even actions and events – by allusion, suggestion, inference, and implication, by the articulation of the gaps between words, in other words, by silence and restraint, by a certain compression, and by the avoidance of ‘diffuseness’ and repetition: by not saying what is said. As Vincent O'Sullivan has suggested, Mansfield's prose is characterized by ‘indirections, shifts of perspective, overlappings of minds, modulations of time, careful imprecisions of moods’ and ‘painstaking randomness’ (CR 140). The difficulty of this new kind of writing – the difficulty of writing it – is expressed in a letter addressed to Dorothy Brett dated 25 July 1921: ‘Oh, Heavens – how difficult Art is. It 's the perpetual work at technique which is so hard.