We discuss the story in more detail in our analysis of it. But when she overhears a young couple making apparently disparaging remarks about her, she appears to undergo an epiphany …

On the particular Sunday that is the focus of the story, the unmarried Miss Brill comes to realise that she, and all of the other people gathered in the gardens, appear to be in a sort of play. ‘Miss Brill’ is a short story by the New-Zealand-born modernist writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), published in the Athenaeum in 1920 and then included in Mansfield’s 1922 collection The Garden Party and Other Stories.Įvery Sunday, a lady named Miss Brill goes to the local public gardens to hear the band play and to sit in the gardens and people-watch. We discuss the story in more depth in our summary and analysis of it. The story is often interpreted as a tale about religion. We won’t say what happens next, but the parable is typically Kafkaesque – in so far as anything else – in its comic absurdism and depiction of the futility of human endeavour. The doorkeeper tells him he cannot grant him access, but that it may be possible to admit the man later. ‘Before the Law’ has inspired numerous critical interpretations and prompted many a debate, in its turn, about what it means.Ī man approaches a doorkeeper and asks to be admitted to ‘the law’. It was published in 1915 and later included in Kafka’s (posthumously published) novel The Trial, where its meaning is discussed by the protagonist Josef K.

This is a very short story or parable by the German-language Bohemian (now Czech) author Franz Kafka (1883-1924).

Conversations with hideous men