The Garden Party

In this volume we're very pleased to bring you Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party'. She was born on 14th October 1888 into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand the middle child of five. A gifted Cello, at one point she thought she might take it up professionally the young Katherine’s first writings were published in school magazines. At 19 Katherine left for Great Britain and met the modernist writers D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. She travelled to Europe before returning to New Zealand in 1906 she began to write the short stories that she would later become famous for. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. By 1908 she had returned to London and to a rather more bohemian lifestyle. A passionate affair resulted in her becoming pregnant but married off instead to an older man who she left the same evening with the marriage unconsummated. She was then to miscarry and be cut out of her mothers will (allegedly because of her lesbianism). In 1911 she was to start a relationship with John Middleton Murry a magazine editor and although it was volatile it enabled her to write some of here best stories. During the First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the tender age of 34 on January 9th 1923 in Fontainebleau, France.