The Garden Party and Other Stories
A wealthy family prepares a garden party while a workman is killed in the road outside, and the youngest daughter is sent to take the leftovers to his widow. Mansfield wrote the story in a few days and it has been anthologised ever since.
The collection around it is just as good: stories about loneliness, illness, travel and the small betrayals of family life. Mansfield's technique is to stay close to a character's senses and then step back at the last moment, leaving the reader to feel the drop. It is a very distinctive kind of sadness.
Public-domain status
First published in 1922. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Katherine Mansfield died in 1923, so this work has been free to republish there since 1994.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 1429 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Dubliners — James Joyce, 1914
- Bliss and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield, 1920
- The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 — Edgar Allan Poe, 1840
- Twice-Told Tales — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837
- Wellington — the city behind the books
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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