Life of Ma Parker is a 1921 short story by Katherine Mansfield.The gentleman opens his door to his charwoman, who tells him that her grandson has died. She then thinks back to her move to London, her husband's death and her grandson's death. After cleaning the gentleman's house, she wishes she has some place where she could go and cry, but as it starts raining she realizes she cannot even do that outside and Ethel is at home, thus preventing her from doing it there too.

Life of Ma Parker is a 1921 short story by Katherine Mansfield.The gentleman opens his door to his charwoman, who tells him that her grandson has died. She then thinks back to her move to London, her husband's death and her grandson's death. After cleaning the gentleman's house, she wishes she has some place where she could go and cry, but as it starts raining she realizes she cannot even do that outside and Ethel is at home, thus preventing her from doing it there too.

Katherine Mansfield (14 October 1888—9 January 1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her most well-known stories are The Garden Party, Bliss and The Fly. All her works have depicted the existing state of women. She has paved the way for the solution of the social problem of female emancipation in a uniquely literary manner.

Virginia Woolf once described Katherine Mansfield as "of the cat kind, alien, composed, always solitary and observant."