the garden party and other stories by katherine mansfield

And I don't see how anyone can fail to enjoy 'The Voyage' or 'Her First Ball'. But it never reads like just a text for an Eng Lit paper: it's a story you can't help engaging with emotionally.There are plenty more gems in this collection as well: 'The singing lesson' is a miracle of construction, which works despite the fact that you can almost see the gears turning to keep it going 'Miss Brill' and 'The Lady's Maid' are both beautiful examples of texts where the reader has to create the story despite the narrator. It seems to have just about everything - endless quantities of plants, a significant piece of music, failures of communication within a bourgeois family, incomprehension between rich and poor, the well-intentioned action that is undermined by its initiator's realisation that she's being patronising. The title-story is one of Mansfield's most anthologised stories, so you'll have read it twenty years ago and answered exam questions on Mansfield's death-imagery, but it's worth coming back to.

The Garden Party - like Bliss - is dominated by an extended story drawn from the author's childhood, in this case 'At the bay', where the family we met in 'Prelude' are staying in a summer-house by the sea, and once again we discover mostly through indirect signs - the plants, the beach, the play of the children - the invisible rifts that run between the members of the apparently harmonious family group.

The garden party and other stories by katherine mansfield