Katherine Mansfield 
The Garden Party and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 


By the end of the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield had assumed her place with Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov as one of the world’s 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.

About the author

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-1923) adopted the name of Katherine Mansfield when she began to publish her fiction in 1907. One of the first to benefit when British institutions of higher education opened to women, she attended Queen’s College in London. The Wellington of her childhood appears as a setting in many of her stories although she returned to her colonial homeland for only two years after leaving Queen’s. Mansfield described herself as ‘a writer first and a woman after.’