The Garden Party and Other Stories
by Katherine Mansfield
Tomorrow was Katherine Mansfield’s birthday. Celebrate by dipping into The Garden Party and Other Stories, her masterpiece, first published 102 years ago.
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand. At fourteen she travelled to school in England, where she met her lifelong companion, Ida Baker. Back in New Zealand she had an intense relationship with Maata Mahupuku, a wealthy young Maori woman, before returning to bohemian London in 1908 and befriending D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.
Pregnant by one man and disastrously married to another, she fled briefly to the Bavarian spa town of Bad Wörishofen in 1909, where she read Chekhov’s short stories for the first time. She began publishing short stories under the name ‘K. Mansfield’ and became a contributor to the avant-garde literary review Rhythm, edited by her lodger John Middleton Murry, whom she later married.
She lived alternately with Murry and her ‘wife’, Ida Baker, until December 1917, when she was diagnosed with extra-pulmonary tuberculosis. She then wandered between European health resorts, attempting to shake off what she called her ‘horrid stray dog’. Her last days were spent at G. I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, where she died in 1923 at the age of thirty-four.
There is ‘no point in writing’, said Virginia Woolf on hearing the news. ‘Katherine won’t read it.’
The Garden Party, published less than a year before her death, is Mansfield’s masterpiece. The fifteen stories, many of which are set in New Zealand, present ordinary situations with vivid sensitivity and haunting detail.
In the title story, party preparations are disturbed by bad news; in ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, two sisters prepare for their father’s funeral; ‘Miss Brill’ is a poignant portrait of an elderly teacher in Paris; and ‘At the Bay’ is an impressionistic portrait of a family by the seaside.
‘The singular beauty of her language consists, partly, in its hardly seeming to be language at all, so glass-transparent is it to her meaning,’ said Elizabeth Bowen.
This portrait of Mansfield, which now hangs in Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington, was painted by the American artist Anne Estelle Rice in 1918, at the Headland Hotel in Looe in Cornwall.
‘A. came early and began the great painting,’ Mansfield wrote in a letter – ‘me in that red, brick red frock with flowers everywhere. It’s awfully interesting, even now. I painted her in my fashion as she painted me in hers: her eyes . . . little blue flowers plucked this morning. . .’
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The Daughters of the Late Colonel. Sublime. My favourite.
I love this book so thank you for the prompt to get it off the shelf and read today. I seem to remember a story titled The Doll’s House which was deeply perceptive about childhood behaviour?