Oxford Bookworms Library
Stage 5: The Garden Party and Other Stories1800 Headwords
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Classics, modern fiction, non-fiction and more. Written for secondary and adult students the Oxford Bookworms Library has seven reading levels from A1-C1 of the CEFR. Oh, how delightful it is to fall in love for the first time! How exciting to go to your first dance when you are a girl of eighteen! But life can also be hard and cruel, if you are young and inexperienced and travelling alone across Europe...or if you are a child from the wrong social class...or a singer without work and the rent to be paid. Set in Europe and New Zealand, these nine stories by Katherine Mansfield dig deep beneath the appearances of life to show us the causes of human happiness and despair. CEFR B2 Word count 22,665
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.
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