The Garden Party and Other Stories

"She seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life."

Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield’s tragically short life. Many are set in the author’s native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience – from the blackly comic ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and the short, sharp sketch ‘Miss Brill’, in which a lonely woman’s precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in ‘At the Bay’. ‘All that I write,’ Mansfield said, ‘all that I am – is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.’ With delicacy and sharp psychological insight, Mansfield captures fleeting moments of everyday life, revealing the fragility of human experience and the subtle shifts of emotion that define it.