This paper provides a framework for considering some of the determinants and implications of readers’ feelings in response to a story by Katherine Mansfield, previously featured in an empirical study of foregrounding (Miall & Kuiken 1994). In additional analyses the paper focuses on feelings that distinguish the story’s episodic structure, its narrative perspective, and phonetic patterns, and considers their effectiveness in post-predicting readers’ data from the 1994 study. Finally, it examines those processes of feeling that may be distinctive to literary response (Miall & Kuiken 2001), and situates the discussion in relation to a theory of readers’ feelings offered by Oatley (2002).