The Garden Party, and Other Stories
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The Garden Party and Other Stories is a 1922 collection of short stories by the writer Katherine Mansfield. Written during the final stages of her illness, "The Garden Party and Other Stories" is full of a sense of urgency and was Katherine Mansfield's last collection to be published during her lifetime. The fifteen stories featured, many of them set in her native New Zealand, vary in length and tone from the opening story, "At the Bay, " a vivid impressionistic evocation of family life, to the short, sharp sketch "Mrs. Brill, " in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour, these stories reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield was a popular New Zealand short-story writer best known for the stories "The Woman at the Shore," "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped," "The Doll’s House," and her twelve-part short story "Prelude," which was inspired by her happy childhood. Although Mansfield initially had her sights set on becoming a professional cellist, her role as editor of the Queen’s College newspaper prompted a change to writing. Mansfield’s style of writing revolutionized the form of the short story at the time, in that it depicted ordinary life and left the endings open to interpretation, while also raising uncomfortable questions about society and identity. Mansfield died in 1923 after struggling for many years with tuberculosis.
More by Katherine Mansfield
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