In December 1915, three months after the death of her beloved younger brother, Leslie Beauchamp, as a result of the Great War, Mansfield records in a letter to John Middleton Murry a ‘vivid dream’ she has experienced. She recounts that in this dream she and Leslie found themselves ‘in Berlin without passports’, ‘having lunch in the waiting room of a railway station […] with several german soldiers just back from the front’ (216). Recalling the dream with the detailed eye of a cinematographer, Mansfield creates a poignant and dramatic scenario for the events that had surfaced in the depths of sleep. These reveal the troubled and polarised state of Anglo-German relations that one would expect at a time of war, as well as communicating the extreme anxiety experienced by so many on either side of this national divide. ‘I see now’, she writes, ‘the proud [German] wives carrying the men's coats for them.’ Then, continuing in the first person as though this is testimony to a real event, she adds, ‘Suddenly in a dreadful pause I began to speak English’; ‘In a flash I knew we were done for. Brother said “Make for the telephone box” but as we got in a soldier smashed his helmet through the glass door. Crash! I woke to a violent peal of thunder’ (216).

When Mansfield began her career as an author, publishing her ‘Pension Sketches’ for the New Age four years earlier, she could not have known that these stories would become a literary preamble to her own personal loss and the terrifying realities of war communicated with such immediacy in her later dream. She may have known, however, that the grotesque caricatures of the German people she created in stories such as ‘Germans at Meat’, ‘The Sister of the Baroness’ and ‘The Modern Soul’ would come to be regarded by some as British anti-invasion literature. This is particularly the case when the stories are read contextually and attention is paid to the ways in which they were shaped for publication, the subject of this paper. In fact, there has been much speculation about Mansfield's first published writings, especially because she came to regard them as ‘young and bad’.