![]() Like the Sheridans in “The Garden Party,” the Beauchamps lived luxuriously, in grand houses in and around Wellington, New Zealand. Like Laura, Mansfield was the daughter of a well-to-do businessman-Harold Beauchamp-and his wife, Annie Burnell Dyer Beauchamp. The story concerns Laura’s alternating moments of resistance and conformity to her mother’s idea of class relations. The main character of the story, Laura, is an idealistic young girl who wishes to cancel the planned afternoon gathering when she learns of the death of a working-class laborer who lives down the hill from her parents’ home. Structured around an early afternoon garden party in New Zealand, “The Garden Party” has clear connections to Mansfield’s own childhood and adolescence in New Zealand. ![]() ![]() “The Garden Party” is a remarkably rich and innovative work that incorporates Mansfield’s defining themes: New Zealand, childhood, adulthood, social class, class conflict, innocence, and experience. Such modernist authors as Virginia Woolf were profoundly influenced by Mansfield’s stream-of-consciousness and symbolic narrative style. ![]() ![]() Widely anthologized, “The Garden Party” is considered Katherine Mansfield’s finest piece of short fiction. ![]()
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