The Garden Party - Katherine Mansfield - 287 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Katherine Mansfield

‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ says Virginia Woolf when Mansfield died of tuberculosis, aged just 35, in 1923. Such was the impact of Mansfield that at such a short time she was already influential in the The Bloomsbury Group, which was a gang/hangout of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century,including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. 



Mansfield was born and raised outside of Victorian England, in New Zealand in 1888. She grew up to be unconventional in both her lifestyle and her writing. Her works explored anxiety - which she suffered from as well and a strong sense of New Zealand identity.


Mansfield was heavily affected by the effects of World War I, when her brother was killed in 1915. Her grief gave way to anxiety which held her a prisoner till most of her life. That was a catalyst for her famous stories such as The Garden Party, Prelude, At the Bay, and An Indiscreet Journey. Other works include The Fly, and The Daughters of the Late Colonel.


The Garden Party 


The Garden Party is about a family in the dilemma of whether to proceed with a party following the news that their neighbour was just killed in an accident, leaving a wife and five small children. It was one of Mansfield's stories dedicated to the memory of her brother who was killed during World War I when a demonstration grenade exploded in his hand in 1915. Told from the point of view of Laura Sheridan who is a young girl struggling to understand the dynamics of social class, wealth, and poverty and her standing in the midst of all these factors. As the story proceeds, we see the mechanical minds of her family oblivious to the working class, their sorrows, difficulties and pains and almost blind to the feelings of their fellow people in the atmosphere of war.



The story is the most famous of the collection. It was written in 1921 and first published in newspapers before the release of The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922.

The collection reflects characteristics of the Modernist literary movement for which Mansfield was known for by that time. Most of the stories rely on symbolism for portraying her views on society, wealth and focus on an individual's experience.