Mansfield's first great New Zealand story, ‘Prelude’, was originally titled ‘The Aloe’. In its final form there stands at its centre the image of the aloe, one of the strange new plants that Kezia comes across as she wanders in the family's new garden. The plant not only looks strange but, as Kezia's mother tells her, has a strange and for her mother strangely attractive reproductive life, only flowering once every hundred years. The aloe appears elsewhere in Mansfield's work, but a comment from Walter Pater's chapter on ‘The Poetry of Michelangelo’ in The Renaissance seems to suggest that the plant had a literary as well as a personal resonance for Mansfield: ‘A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe,’ remarks Pater, ‘is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable’. Surprise, in the form of strangeness and ‘queerness’, was central to Mansfield's sense of her own work. The point is made in a letter of 25 March 1915 as she was beginning work on ‘The Aloe’: writing from Paris to Murry, Mansfield likens her story to the ‘grotesque’ shapes of boats ‘dancing’ on the water in the dark, ‘with people rather dark and seen strangely as they move in the sharp light and shadow’: ‘Its queer stuff ‘, she remarks of her story (CLKM i. 168). In another letter to Murry written six years later in January 1921, she comments on her sequel to ‘The Aloe’/ ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’: ‘I have written a huge long story of a rather new kind,’ she tells Murry, ‘its the outcome of the Prelude method – it just unfolds and opens.’ Again, the story is characterized in Mansfield's mind by its strangeness: ‘Its a queer tale, though,’ she remarks (CLKM iv. 156).

Referring to ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, Elizabeth Bowen writes of Mansfield's ‘august, peaceful New Zealand stories’ (CR 75). The two stories, with their elaborate contrapuntal structures, are often construed as Mansfield's most accomplished works. The stories are both set in New Zealand and centre around the Burnell family, a family that is clearly inspired by Mansfield's memories of her Beauchamp childhood. ‘They would be miracles of memory’, comments Bowen, ‘if one considered them memories at all ’.