Free Summarizer
Daily · Classics

Bliss, and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield · short story collection, 1920·5 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version5 hrs → 50 sec
  • Bertha cannot locate the source of her own joy. The story opens with Bertha Young, thirty years old, seized by a feeling she cannot name or express: "as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun." She arranges fruit into two pyramids on the dining table just to watch the glass dish seem to float in the dusky light.
  • She steals her own baby back from the nurse. Bertha takes over feeding her infant daughter, thinking it absurd to keep a child "in another woman's arms." Nanny hands the baby over "very offended," and Bertha eats up the five stolen minutes before the telephone interrupts.
  • She has invited a woman she cannot read. Bertha has invited Pearl Fulton, a guest she has fallen for the way she always falls for "beautiful women who had something strange about them." Her husband Harry calls Miss Fulton dullish and blames it on "a good stomach," but Bertha is certain there is something behind her sideways smile.
  • She waits at a window for a signal that never comes. At dinner Bertha and Miss Fulton stand together looking at the pear tree, "silver as Miss Fulton," and Bertha decides this kind of understanding "happens very, very rarely between women. Never between men." She waits, certain a signal is coming, though she cannot say what she means by it.
  • The real signal was meant for someone else entirely. Reaching for a poetry book with the guest Eddie Warren, Bertha turns toward the hall and sees Harry seize Miss Fulton by the shoulders: "His lips said: 'I adore you,' and Miss Fulton laid her moonbeam fingers on his cheeks." He whispers "To-morrow," and her eyelids answer yes.
  • The tree does not care what she just learned. Miss Fulton's parting words are "Your lovely pear tree," repeated twice as she leaves with Eddie. Bertha runs to the window asking what is going to happen now, but the tree is "as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still," indifferent to what she has just found out.
Summarized by FreeSummarizer.com

•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: Mansfield built an entire betrayal out of things nobody says out loud, and the final line hands the emotional payoff to a tree instead of a person.

A woman spends one evening drowning in unnamed happiness, then watches it get named for her at her own dinner party.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

Want the 30-second version of your own documents?

Summarize Pro batches your PDFs, papers and reports into this exact format, every key claim cited to its source page.

Get 25 free Pro pages →

More from the archive

Tales of the Jazz Age/daily/tales-of-the-jazz-ageLove of Life, and Other Stories/daily/love-of-life-and-other-storiesPlain Tales from the Hills/daily/plain-tales-from-the-hillsLyrical Ballads/daily/lyrical-ballads-with-a-few-other-poems