The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Oblique narration (influenced by Chekhov but certainly developed by Mansfield) includes the use of symbolism - the doll's house lamp, the fly, the pear tree - hinting at the hidden layers of meaning. Themes too are universal: human isolation, the questioning of traditional roles of men and women in society, the conflict between love and disillusionment, idealism and reality, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, and the inevitability of these paradoxes.

Her imagery, frequently from nature, flowers, wind and colours, set the scene with which readers can identify easily. They feature simple things - a doll's house or a charwoman. The stories are innovative in many other ways. The plot is secondary to mood and characters. Wells), Mansfield concentrated on one moment, a crisis or a turning point, rather than on a sequence of events. Supplanting the strictly structured plots of her predecessors in the genre (Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling, H. Mansfield's stories were the first of significance in English to be written without a conventional plot. She used her memories in her writing from the beginning, people, the places, even the colloquial speech of the country form the fabric of much of her best work. Nevertheless, Mansfield was a New Zealand writer - she could not have written as she did had she not gone to live in England and France, but she could not have done her best work if she had not had firm roots in her native land. She was associated with the brilliant group of writers who made the London of the period the centre of the literary world. Katherine Mansfield was part of a 'new dawn' in English literature with T. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. A number of her works, including 'Miss Brill', 'Prelude', 'The Garden Party', 'The Doll's House', and later works such as 'The Fly', are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp) was a prominent New Zealand modernist writer of short fiction who wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield.

The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield