The Fly

"The Fly" is a 1922 short story by Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield wrote the story in February 1922 at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Montparnasse, Paris. It was first published in The Nation and Athenaeum on 18 March 1922 and in The Doves' Nest and Other Stories in 1923. The story relates to the death of a soldier in World War I. In October 1915, Mansfield's younger brother, Leslie Beauchamp, was killed during a grenade training drill while serving with the British Expeditionary Force in Ypres Salient, Belgium. He was 21. Like the soldier in the story, before enlisting Leslie had worked for his father's firm. Leslie and Mansfield's father Harold Beauchamp owned an importing company.