The Garden Party and Other Stories is the first book I read by Katherine Mansfield. Now I’m not sure what kind of anticipation I had, but I’m sure I never expected such a book. Although it took me a while to get used to the language and style of the author, it was a pleasure to walk around the world she created. I think it would be very nice to read this with a cold drink, especially in the summer heat. The scent of Mansfield’s flowers will reach your nose, and you’ll hear the sound of the sea.
The Garden Party and Other Stories consists of fifteen short stories. My favourite is The Garden Party. In addition to a pleasant effect, it also leaves a little embarrassment. I do not want to explain why but if you read it one day you’ll understand. Apart from this story, the first story in the book, the Gulf, will be a story you will love immediately with the atmosphere it creates. You will be amazed by everything from the clothes the women wear to the cute atmosphere of Crescent Bay.
Mansfield first creates a beautiful environment in the reader’s mind. You cannot help but be a part of that world. In my opinion, the world created by the author will appeal to you more than what happens in her stories. I didn’t get used to the author’s language right away, and I can say that I was more or less bored with some of her stories. However, if you want to read Mansfield, this is the book. Enjoy!
The Garden Party and Other Stories
Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield’s tragically short life. Many are set in the author’s native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience – from the blackly comic ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and the short, sharp sketch ‘Miss Brill’, in which a lonely woman’s precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in ‘At the Bay’. ‘All that I write,’ Mansfield said, ‘all that I am – so is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.’
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent modernist writer who was born and brought up in New Zealand. She wrote short stories and so poetry under the pen name Katherine Mansfield.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
