The Garden Party: And Other Stories

Introduction by Colm Tóibín

In fifteen funny, colorful, poignant and mysterious stories, the irreverent modernist Katherine Mansfield, a friend and contemporary of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, examines a range of themes integral to the human experience, from marriage, family, and death to duty, disillusionment, and regret in this commanding collection, part of the Ecco Art of the Story series.

Written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield’s tragically short life in the chaotic years after World War I, the fifteen stories in The Garden Party are as fresh, perceptive, and vivid today as they were nearly a century ago. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand while others take place in England or on the French Riviera. In each, Mansfield explores the small yet transformative epiphanies in every day life and illuminates the unspoken, often misunderstood emotions common to us all.

In the wry "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," two sisters discover that freedom from their father isn’t quite what they expected it to be. A lonely and naïve older woman’s contrived sense of self is painfully challenged in "Miss Brill." "At the Bay" considers the plight of a happily married young woman who struggles to find equality with her husband.

The Garden Party is an enduring work of literary craftsmanship from a marvelous modern artist.

Funny, colorful, poignant, and mysterious: fifteen tales from irreverent modernist Katherine Mansfield, with a preface by the legendary Colm Tóibín

written toward the end of Mansfield’s tragically short life, in the chaotic years after World War I, the fifteen stories in The Garden Party are as fresh, perceptive, and vivid today as they were nearly a century ago. In tales set in her birthplace of New Zealand, as well as in England and on the French Riviera,  Mansfield explores the small yet transformative epiphanies in everyday life and illuminates the unspoken, often misunderstood emotions common to us all.

In the wry “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” two sisters discover that freedom from their father isn’t quite what they expected it to be. A lonely and naïve older woman’s contrived sense of self is painfully challenged in “Miss Brill.” “At the Bay” considers the plight of a happily married young woman who struggles to find equality with her husband.

The Garden Party is an enduring work of literary craftsmanship from a marvelous modern artist.

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born and raised in colonial New Zealand. At nineteen, Mansfield moved to the United Kingdom, where she befriended D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. She published three short story collections, In a German Pension, Bliss, and The Garden Party, before she died from extrapulmonary tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.

"Mansfield...is one of the progenitors of modernist literature.... Her imaginative worlds and their inhabitants are so inviting." - Forbes

"Mansfield was a pioneering modernist... The collection to start with is The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922 when she was at the peak of her powers. Her range and skill here is thrilling... The title story is one of her best known.... And the ending is wonderfully ambivalent, as it is so often in Mansfield’s work." - The Guardian