"Bliss" is set in the early 1900s in London, where the story plays out in an upscale house owned by the affluent couple Bertha and Harry Young. Bertha and Harry are portrayed as members of the cultured London elite, and they surround themselves with artistically inclined, well-bred friends. Bertha views her dinner guests as "modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions." Unlike middle-class Britons (whom Mrs. Norman Knight calls "stodgy—so utterly without a sense of humor"), the Youngs and their friends pride themselves on their education, their understanding of art and culture, and their ostensibly progressive, enlightened values. Throughout the dinner party, they talk relatively openly about taboo subjects like sex and suicide while also alluding to their own connections to an avant-garde artistic scene. What's clear, then, is that Bertha and the other characters see themselves as part of a cultured elite.
But while this setting seems potentially inclusive and forward-thinking, it quickly becomes apparent that it is still a prohibitive world for women. Bertha, who appears less educated and culturally aware than her guests, is virtually excluded from their dinner conversations, and as a housewife and mother, she is still relegated to the role of obliging hostess, overshadowed by her husband's domineering presence at the party. Equally telling is Mansfield's choice of name for the character Mrs. Knight, who is referred to by her husband's full name, "Mrs. Norman Knight" but never by her own name.
The story's setting bears much in common with the settings of two modernist novels written by British authors in the same era: E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Both novels (also set in London) illuminate tensions between independence and restriction for upper-class women in 20th-century English society, gesturing toward the constraints women faced as they sought to make their own way in the world—even in supposedly liberal circles in which they were afforded some agency.
