The Daughters of the Late Colonel by Katherine Mansfield
Quick answer: The Daughters of the Late Colonel by Katherine Mansfield: summary and ending, characters, themes of repression and lost time, and the craft of comic grief.
The Colonel has been dead a week, and his two middle-aged daughters still cannot quite believe he will not burst in to demand why he was buried without his permission. Katherine Mansfield published The Daughters of the Late Colonel in the London Mercury in 1921, and considered it among her best work; many critics agree, ranking it with The Garden Party as her finest sustained performance.
It is the funniest story Mansfield ever wrote and one of the saddest, often in the same sentence. Josephine and Constantia, ageing spinsters trained into terror by a domestic tyrant, spend twelve short sections trying to perform the duties of bereavement, deciding about the porter's cap, the watch, the maid, the nephew's breakfast, while the real subject rises slowly underneath: what has happened to their lives. The ending, in which both sisters forget what they were about to say, is one of modern fiction's great quiet devastations.
The story in brief, ending included
The story unfolds in twelve numbered episodes across the week after Colonel Pinner's death. Josephine and Constantia, his unmarried daughters, lie awake debating whether to dye their dressing gowns black, agonise over having given the porter their father's top hat, and host the terrifyingly efficient Nurse Andrews at meals where the butter must be watched. Memory keeps replaying the deathbed: the Colonel opened one eye only, glared, and died, and the sisters half-fear they will be blamed for it forever. A visit to his room to sort his things collapses in dread; Constantia locks the wardrobe with the feeling she has done something dreadfully bold, and both flee. They decide, by not deciding, to postpone everything. Their brother's son Cyril visits in a remembered scene, whose comic centrepiece is shouting to the deaf Colonel about whether Cyril's father is still fond of meringues.
In the final sections, the barrel organ plays outside and the sisters realise, with a start, that it no longer matters: father will never thump his stick again to have it stopped. It is a week since he died. Sunlight comes in. Josephine begins to feel the future might now begin, and Constantia, staring at her favourite Buddha on the mantelpiece, gropes toward a thought about the life they never had, the years of mail-watching and father-tending, of wanting things without knowing what. Each sister starts to speak, each defers to the other, and each finds the thought has slipped away. I forget what I was going to say, Constantia murmurs, and Josephine answers that she has forgotten too. The story ends on their double forgetting, the door of the future swinging shut as softly as it opened.
The characters and what they want
A four-person study in the long half-life of tyranny.
Themes and meaning
Exam answers should name repression and wasted life: two women so thoroughly governed that even the tyrant's death arrives as another rule they might be breaking. Time is the second theme, the story's week of mourning opening backward onto decades of postponement, and the recurring sun, moon and barrel-organ imagery marking a world of feeling the sisters were never allowed to enter. Comedy itself is thematic: Mansfield renders terror in the key of farce, and the laughter keeps measuring the damage.
The sharper point is that the ending is a mercy and a sentence at once. The forgotten thought is clearly the thought, the recognition of what their lives might still become, and the sisters lose it not because they are stupid but because sixty years of deference have destroyed the muscle that holds a self-assertion steady. Yet Mansfield refuses contempt; the final scene is tender, almost musical, two voices offering each other the right to speak and both declining. The tragedy is administered without a single cruel sentence, which is why it goes so deep.
The craft: structure as psychology
The twelve-part fragmentation is the sisters' minds made visible: no section quite finishes its business, scenes are remembered out of order, and climaxes are approached and abandoned, exactly as Josephine and Constantia approach and abandon every decision. Writers can take the lesson that form should enact character; a hesitating story about hesitation earns effects a linear telling could not reach. Note also Mansfield's use of comic props with serial meaning, the meringues, the top hat, the watch that may go to Ceylon, each ridiculous and each a small container of grief.
The final scene is a model of the double ending: an epiphany offered and withdrawn in the same gesture. Both sisters reach the threshold of speech; the paragraph even lets sunlight and the Buddha lean in encouragingly; then the thought dissolves, and its dissolution is the climax. For anyone drafting a contest entry, this is the high-difficulty version of emotional impact: the feeling lands precisely because it is dropped, and the judges' marks for character are won by what the characters cannot manage to say.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, structure your essay around the story's own structure: twelve fragments as a portrait of trained indecision.
- Use the barrel organ moment as the turning point where the tyrant's death becomes real.
- Cite the double forgetting at the end as epiphany denied, and name which sister comes closest.
- Writers: let your story's form mimic your character's central flaw, hesitation told hesitantly.
- Give grief comic props, a hat, a dessert, a watch, and let repetition load them with feeling.
- Build an ending where the realisation is reached for and lost; the reach is the story.
Try it yourself
Write a story in numbered fragments about two people in the week after a controlling figure leaves their lives, by death or departure. Let every practical decision go unmade, and end with both characters forgetting the one important thing they meant to say.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Daughters of the Late Colonel?
A week after their father's death, sunlight and a barrel organ prompt both sisters toward the thought that their own lives might finally begin. Each starts to speak, defers to the other, and finds the thought gone; the story ends with both saying they have forgotten what they meant to say.
What is the theme of The Daughters of the Late Colonel?
The story is about lives consumed by obedience: decades of serving a domestic tyrant have left Josephine and Constantia unable to act, decide or even complete a liberating thought. Mansfield treats them with comedy and tenderness rather than scorn, which sharpens the sadness.
Is The Daughters of the Late Colonel a comedy or a tragedy?
It is both at once: the surface is farce, dyed dressing gowns, meringues shouted at a deaf old man, while the underlying matter is two wasted lives. The comic method is the point; laughter keeps measuring what the sisters lost.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.