Here’s a review of Mansfield’s The Garden Party I wrote a while back. I’ve made a few corrections to it:
Recently, I got a bit caught up reading The Garden Party, a collection of Edwardian author Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. First off, I liked her name. It seems strangely familiar at first, but that’s largely due to the fact that it’s an amalgam of the names of screen goddesses Katherine Hepburn and Jayne Mansfield. Anyway, Mansfield who was born in 1888 and died tragically young in 1923, was an extremely gifted writer who grew up in New Zealand but eventually moved to Britain — I don’t suppose there was much going on in New Zealand at that time or whether there is even now. She’s strongly associated with the modernist movement in literature and as the author biog at the front of my shiny new Penguin edition explains she was quite happy to label herself a modernist; it’s not a label that later critics would awkwardly try to shoehorn her into. The modernists to explain briefly, were an iconoclastic literary movement who felt themselves duty-bound to free literature from such outmoded notions as plot, storyline, the conventions of narrative and of grammar: they were unconventional. You’ve heard the usual roll call of names from the early 20th century — Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Elliot, etc. — and if you haven’t you really ought to read more.
