The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

In this final collection, published less than a year before her death, Mansfield had honed her craft to perfection and truly understood what could be achieved with the medium of the short story. 14 (which will be published in 2022), we invite essays that explore the formal, textual, cultural and contextual aspects of one of the finest – and most influential – short-story collections of global Anglophone modernism: Mansfield’s The Garden-Party and Other Stories, first published in 1922, that annus mirabilis of modernist literature, which also saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Indeed, Mansfield remains, in the words of critic Peter Childs, ‘the most important Modernist author who wrote only short stories’.įor Katherine Mansfield Studies Vol. The opening paragraph to Mansfield’s story ‘At the Bay’ is recognised as one of the finest ever written in the English language, its modernist credentials evident with every pitch-perfect flick of the author’s pen. Katherine Mansfield, ‘At the Bay’, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come rippling, rippling – how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again.’ Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness.

The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK

The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)

THE PEER-REVIEWED YEARBOOK OF THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY

The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield