the garden party and other stories by katherine mansfield

The death of her brother during a World War I training exercise in 1915 spurred her to start writing more and seriously reflecting on her childhood in New Zealand. Over the next decade in London she maintained friendships with other prominent modernists, particularly Virginia Woolf, and married her editor, John Middleton Murry, after dating on and off for nearly a year. Mansfield longed for a return to London and successfully found passage back in 1908. During this period, she began to publish stories and developed complicated relationships with Edith Kathleen Bendall, an artist, and Maata Mahupuku, a Maori woman whose path from Wellington to London and back again paralleled Mansfield’s and who appears in many of her stories. When she returned to New Zealand in 1906, she just as quickly became dissatisfied with the routine of endless social functions and empty courtship that her parents expected her to undertake it is this period in her life-Mansfield’s dissatisfaction with her privileged, cloistered upbringing-that “The Garden Party” most recalls. She was determined to become a writer from grade school in 1903, her family sent her and her two sisters to study in London where she quickly became an accomplished cellist. The Sheridans’ estate in “The Garden Party” is based on Mansfield’s own childhood home on Tinakori Road in Wellington, which is now a museum to her memory.

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in New Zealand to a successful Australian-born English business family.

The garden party and other stories by katherine mansfield