“No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all”

Miss Brill is a short story about an older lady's Sunday outing to the park, it was written in 1922 by Katherine Mansfield, and was published in the short-story collection The Garden Party; it has since gained unfaltering popularity.

Miss Brill is about the harsh meeting with reality; the moment in which you see everything you have denied to be true. The protagonist in the story suddenly understands that her life is not as wonderful as she believed, and that she herself has been fooling herself, an epiphany at least I have can easily relate to.Sometimes it is easier for us humans to pretend than to deal with the hardships of life, especially when it comes to dealing with our failures and mistakes. 

Miss Brill is a reminder of how our own view of our lives and surroundings are always limited to what we choose and are willing to see. It is about our ability to deflect our own problems and insecurities onto others instead of taking our lives into our own hands. Most glaringly though, it is about loneliness and how to deal with loneliness. Katherine Mansfield does a great job of creating a sympathetic character that the reader cannot help but emphasize with, in fact I became so sympathetic to her situation that I wished that she would keep living in her fantasy-world, of sorts, instead of realizing reality. this To me, story is an excellent example of literary fiction where the author show instead of telling and you end up with life lessons without ever noticing actually learning them.