Katherine Mansfield and the Garden Party and Other Stories

New scholarship on Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories together with creative work inspired by Mansfield

The last collection of short stories published in her lifetime, The Garden Party and Other Stories would solidify Katherine Mansfield’s place as the most prominent modernist short story writer of her generation. Early reviewers of the collection commented on the similarities it shared with her previous collection, Bliss and Other Stories; however, while contemporary reviews were mixed, many emphasised the psychological power of her stories, praising how she was able to bring her characters to life in a way simple action could not. While it contains some of Mansfield’s most sophisticated and well-loved stories, several of the stories in The Garden Party initially appeared in the Sphere, and thus were often dismissed as inferior. Mansfield herself felt some of these stories fell short of her desired effect, though recent scholarship has revealed their greater complexity. The essays in this volume, by both seasoned and newer Mansfield scholars, work to continue this conversation. The collection also includes Mansfield-inspired short fiction, two translations of memorial poems dedicated to Mansfield by Chinese and French contemporaries with accompanying notes, and a recently re-discovered book review by Mansfield. In addition, Sydney Janet Kaplan provides a reflection on her personal meeting with Christopher Isherwood, a writer heavily influenced by the life and work of Mansfield.

Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

A Professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin’s primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group.