Like much of Mansfield’s writing, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” belongs primarily to two genres of fiction: modernist and feminist literature. Firstly, Katherine Mansfield is one of the canonical figures of the Modernist movement of writing.
Modernism emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a response to the dramatic changes in society and culture brought about by the end of the Victorian period and the First World War. Modernist writers often focused on the inner workings of the human mind, trying to depict the flow of time, and on the subjective nature of reality. Mansfield's narrative style is full of this focus on individual experience. She thinks intensely about the psychology of her characters and the fragmented and nonlinear way that human beings experience time and memory. Because of this, many aspects of her writing mimic the patterns of thinking and consciousness. The story’s narration often breaks from following conventional chronological time, becoming more fluid and associative as the Pinner sisters re-experience memories and flashbacks. Mansfield experiments with time, allowing the past to intermingle with the present. She does this to add nuance to her characterization and to show how Jug and Con’s shared past trauma affects their present.
Mansfield’s writing also often focuses on highlighting the injustices faced by women and girls, which is the central aim of a lot of feminist literature. Her narrators spend a great deal of their energy critiquing the social and financial structures that perpetuate gender inequality and class differences. Mansfield also often uses dark humor and sarcasm to show the absurdity of these limitations: the reader sees this in the Pinner sisters' interactions with Cyril, Kate, and Nurse Andrews especially. Mansfield's work is highly critical of the patriarchy, and this story is an excellent example of this; it’s literally about women being oppressed by a father figure. It contains both the overt patriarchy represented by the “late Colonel” and its broader British context that dictates their roles as women. The narrative exposes how these social constraints crush their potential, forcing them into childlike submission and dependency.
