The Garden Party

Katherine Mansfield

May 2016 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

From one of the most influential and talented masters of the short story—and the writer of whom Virginia Woolf wrote, “I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of”—comes an exquisite paragon of the form. 

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.
  
An ebook short.

About the author

KATHERINE MANSFIELD was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and died in Fontainebleau in 1923. She came to London for the latter part of her education, and could not settle down back in Wellington society; in 1908 she again left for Europe, never to return. Her first writing (apart from some early sketches) was published in The New Age, to which she became a regular contributor. Her first book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. In 1912 she began to write for Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married.

She was a conscious modernist, an experimenter in life and writing, and mixed with others of her kind, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. With Prelude in 1916 she evolved her distinctive voice as a writer of short fiction. By 1917 she had contracted tuberculosis, and from that time led a wandering life in search of health. Her second book of stories, Bliss, was published in 1921, and her third, The Garden Party, appeared a year later. It was the last book to be published in her lifetime. After her death, two more collections of stories were published, also her Letters and later her Journal.