The Garden Party and Other Stories

The Garden Party and Other Stories is a 1922 collection of short stories by the writer Katherine Mansfield. Written during the final stages of her illness The Garden Party and Other Stories is full of a sense of urgency and was Katherine Mansfields last collection to be published during her lifetime. The fifteen stories featured many of them set in her native New Zealand vary in length and tone from the opening story At the Bay a vivid impressionistic evocation of family life to the short sharp sketch Mrs. Brill in which a lonely womans precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour these stories reveal Mansfields supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.