The Garden Party, and Other Stories

Fifteen stories. In "At the Bay", a New Zealand summer morning opens over Crescent Bay and a whole family's day unfolds through it. In the title story a girl arranging a garden party learns that a carter has been killed at the foot of the hill, and is sent down afterwards with the leftover sandwiches. In "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" two middle-aged sisters, released by their father's death, cannot decide anything at all, including whether they are sorry. "Miss Brill" takes her fur to the park on Sunday and overhears what a young couple think of her; "Life of Ma Parker" has nowhere in London to go and cry; "The Voyage", "Her First Ball", "The Stranger", "Marriage à la Mode" and the rest work the same way, cutting into a life at an ordinary moment and leaving before it resolves.

Katherine Mansfield published the collection in 1922, the year before she died at thirty-four. It is the book in which her method is complete — a story made of shifting interior views rather than plot, owing something to Chekhov and owing the New Zealand ones to a childhood she was writing from the other side of the world.

This Bibliomancer edition presents all fifteen stories complete.