The Garden Party
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Average rating3.9
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection An afternoon at the Sheridan’s garden party will be perfect. Darling Laura is doing a marvelous job negotiating with the band, workmen, cook, and florist who appears with an unexpected delivery, all without her mother’s help. But, distressing news reaches the house just before lunch. A young man from one of the sordid little cottages down the lane was killed in an accident, and suddenly Laura can’t imagine proceeding with the party. From Katherine Mansfield, one of the most talented and pioneering masters of the short story in English, of whom Virginia Woolf once wrote: “I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of,” “The Garden Party” is an exquisite paragon of the form. An ebook short.
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I first heard of Katherine Mansfield after an afternoon tour bus took me to her house in Wellington New Zealand. Pressed for time and wanting to see the sites a few of us took up the chance of seeing this damn fine city and part of the tour was her house. Being the reading type I got this famous title and now after many a year have finally read it.
First I have enjoyed it though it took me to read an explainer after the first story that had left me wondering what I was missing, Modernism apparently. Once I got the gist of what was trying to be achieved, I enjoyed these short stories a lot more than I might have.
The style seemed all very much a comment on the bourgeois middle class of the times, with a couple of exceptions. Also, very colonial, but then Katherine Mansfield was of that class.
I suspect that this is not really my style of literature, glad to have read and enjoyed it but now know why I did not enjoy Virginia Woolf when I read her in my youth. I further suspect that I would not have enjoyed this if I was made to read it in high school.
