The Garden Party (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading): and Other Stories

By Katherine Mansfield and Lynette Felber

By the end of the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield had assumed her place with Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov as one of the worlds most admired and respected short story writers.

Her best-known stories, "The Garden Party," "Her First Ball," and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," are widely appreciated and frequently anthologized as masterpieces of the short story form. One of a handful of writers whose names have become synonymous with British modernism, Mansfield was viewed by Virginia Woolf as her most formidable professional rival and fictionalized by D. H. Lawrence as the independent, artistic Gudrun Brangwen in his novel Women in Love. After her death from tuberculosis in 1923 at age thirty-four, her posthumous reputation was fueled by the tireless (but also self-serving) efforts of her editor and husband, John Middleton Murry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431386

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was a popular New Zealand short-story writer best known for the stories "The Woman at the Shore," "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped," "The Doll’s House," and her twelve-part short story "Prelude," which was inspired by her happy childhood. Although Mansfield initially had her sights set on becoming a professional cellist, her role as editor of the Queen’s College newspaper prompted a change to writing. Mansfield’s style of writing revolutionized the form of the short story at the time, in that it depicted ordinary life and left the endings open to interpretation, while also raising uncomfortable questions about society and identity. Mansfield died in 1923 after struggling for many years with tuberculosis.