The Garden Party

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.