Death pervades Mansfield's short stories. Her own illness of pleurisy/consumption and the harsh effects of World War I focused her thinking and reactions. As social commentator, she continued to remain an active participant in the European intelligencia. Like many of her contemporaries, however, Mansfield felt cut off from the harshness of death and war (x-xi). .
The Daughters of The Late Colonel and The Garden Party depict characters in society facing the real world consequences of death. Through Josephine and Constantia in Daughters, Mansfield emphasizes how illness and death pervades not only the dead but the living as well. Death cuts the daughters off from an adult, mature life; trapped in their service to the memory of their overbearing father that leaves them ill-equipped and unprepared to live life on their own. In The Garden Party.".
"The Daughters of the Late Colonel" - from The Garden Party (1922).
This is the story of two middle-aged women - Constantia and Josephine - lamenting the death of their father but haunted by the possibility that he may return. They imagine him hiding in the chest of drawers and about to tell them off for having buried him: "'Buried. You two girls had me buried!' she heard his stick thumping." They are immersed in elaborate fantasies, of "two black dressing-gowns and two pairs of black woolly slippers, creeping off to the bathroom like black cats" and "the desert, to where that line of camels unwound like a thread of wool." The women are terrified of their father and are haunted by the manner in which he died, with one eye open: "But no - one eye only. It glared at them a moment and then. went out." Even to one another, they make all the dutiful remarks - "we miss our dear father so much" - as though trying to dilute their lasting impression of him. He has had a dominating role in their lives for a long time and the two women have as a result not been allowed to grow up, having spent their life "trying not to annoy father.
