Katherine Mansfield · 1922

The Garden Party, and Other Stories

Fifteen stories where a garden party, a fur or a dead father’s hat reveal what people cannot say.

Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 collection gathers fifteen stories, opening with “At the Bay”, a summer day at a New Zealand seaside, and “The Garden Party”, in which a family’s party goes ahead after a neighbour’s death. Others follow two sisters sorting out their dead father’s belongings, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, and a solitary teacher in a park on a Sunday, “Miss Brill”. Mansfield wrote several of them in Switzerland while ill with tuberculosis, and died the following January.

First published
1922
Literary form
collection
Original language
English
Published text languages
English · Vietnamese
Reading time
≈ 3 h 58 min read
Read · English
Black-and-white photograph of a two-storey Victorian villa with a columned porch, half hidden by tall trees, below steep bare hills, with a gravel drive in the foreground.
Image from the period. Residence of William Hort Levin seen from Tinakori Road, Wellington, about 1900–1910; photograph from the negatives of Henry Charles Clarke Wright (Alexander Turnbull Library). A period view of the street where Mansfield’s childhood home stood, not the Sheridan house and not an illustration of the book. Cropped at the top to remove plate damage.Henry Charles Clarke Wright, W H Levin’s house and drive from Tinakori Rd, c. 1900–1910. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. Public domain. Wikimedia Commons. Source

Why it matters

The Garden Party and Other Stories is a 1922 collection of fifteen stories by the New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield. Project Gutenberg lists them in this order: “At the Bay”, “The Garden Party”, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, “Mr and Mrs Dove”, “The Young Girl”, “Life of Ma Parker”, “Marriage à la Mode”, “The Voyage”, “Miss Brill”, “Her First Ball”, “The Singing Lesson”, “The Stranger”, “Bank Holiday”, “An Ideal Family” and “The Lady’s Maid”. It is alive because a few pages of ordinary events, a party, a walk in a park, a sorting of a dead man’s things, are enough to show how people protect themselves from what they feel.

“At the Bay” first appeared in the London Mercury in January 1922 in twelve sections; the book printed it with a short coda that is now its thirteenth. Wikipedia says Mansfield wrote it, along with “The Garden Party”, at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana, Switzerland, in the productive months when she felt she did not have much time left. “The Garden Party” ran in the Saturday Westminster Gazette in February 1922, and its setting is based on her childhood home on Tinakori Road in Wellington. Wikipedia calls her one of the prime innovators of the short story form, and these stories are a main reason why.

Notice how the narration moves between minds: Laura in “The Garden Party” first imagines herself above the workmen, then feels kinship with them, then, catching sight of herself in a new hat, decides to forget the matter until the party is over. In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, two sisters cannot settle what to do with a top hat or a watch, and the objects show what they never say about their father. In “Miss Brill”, a fur is taken out cheerfully and put back in its box after a stranger’s remark. Content note: death, bereavement and cruelty recur, and “The Garden Party” includes a visit to a dead man’s house.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.

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The Garden Party, and Other Stories

English

The Garden Party, and Other Stories · English, Project Gutenberg #1429

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Translation availability is still being researched. A draft is not evidence that no translation exists.

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