This essay focuses on a comparative analysis of the short stories ‘Bliss’ (1918) by Katherine Mansfield and ‘The Apple Tree’ (1952) by Daphne du Maurier, two stories that illustrate key literary parallels: the use of dramatic irony, ‘organic unity’ and liminal spaces. In recent years, literary criticism has repositioned Mansfield as a vital contributor to the development of literary modernism. Her influence upon other writers is still being explored and the short stories of du Maurier, herself erroneously regarded as merely a popular novelist, indicate both Mansfield and modernism as primary influences. Clare Drewery argues that there are ‘few comparative discussions of modernist women's short stories’; this study attempts to redress such an imbalance by showing how a close reading of Mansfield and du Maurier's stories illuminates the current debate on genre and gender within shorter fiction.

Mansfield died in 1923, when du Maurier was only sixteen, but she was a significant influence on du Maurier, who commented that ‘[s]urely Katherine Mansfield would not have been so easily discouraged?’, when trying to overcome the difficulties of living as a writer. In this we see that du Maurier is not only taking literary inspiration from Mansfield, but also using her as a model for living, as well as for the development of her fiction. In a letter from du Maurier to her governess, Maud Waddell (known in the du Maurier family as Tod), the twenty-one- year-old fledgling writer comments: