Garden Party and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is credited alongside James Joyce as the creator of the modern short story. The New Zealand-born Englishwoman embraced a Bohemian lifestyle and became involved in a series of scandalous relationships, which greatly influenced some of her most significant work. Her best-known writings were produced in her final years, as she was plagued by illness. Her fiction is dominated by themes of male-female relationships, sexual ambivalence and gender roles. Most of her work focuses on female protagonists and demonstrates the problems of social relationships. This collection, written between 1920-1922, includes "e;At the Bay,"e; a story that proposes there is more to a woman's life than marriage and motherhood; "e;The Garden Party,"e; which explores class differences; "e;The Daughters of the Late Colonel,"e; a story about life and death; "e;Marriage a la Mode,"e; about the dissolution of a relationship; "e;Miss Brill,"e; Mansfield's memorable tale of the lonely woman, and several more.