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A review by thaurisil
The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
3.0
These short stories feel like vignettes of everyday life. They start in the middle of the action, and we only find out who the characters are and how they relate to each other from hints casually dropped along the way as the stories progress. You feel like you're passing by characters, catching a glimpse of their life, some at more momentous occasions than others, then passing on before conflicts are resolved, as often occurs in real life.
Though the stories are unrelated, each feels like a part of a cohesive whole, because of the common motifs and themes and run through them. All are set in either New Zealand or England, the two places where Katherine Mansfield lived, and contain beautiful descriptions of flowers, gardens, sunrises, sunsets, mist, and the sea. They are atmospheric, and they have a detached, hazy wistful poignancy.
Katherine Mansfield grew up in New Zealand with three sisters and a brother. Her parents were somewhat neglectful and left her largely in the care of her grandmother. She moved to England but never truly settled down in the literary circles there. Virginia Woolf was a close friend, but while the two respected and enjoyed each other's company, there were also jealous of each other and occasionally bad-mouthed each other behind their backs. Her marriage was happy on the outside but tempestuous in reality. In her last years, she contracted tuberculosis, and while fighting death wrote several books, including this one.
These themes from Mansfield's life replay in the stories in the book. Neglectful mothers let their children grow up pampered and with little direct parental supervision. Young, pretty girls from upper class families, navigate the reality of the outside world. Some, with scornful attitudes, bully men and their own parents. Some struggle with social hierarchies, outwardly doing what is "right" and befitting of their social status (i.e. disdaining the lower classes), but inwardly yearning for the freedom and innocence of their childhood. People struggle with their inner soft feelings of love, sensitivity and sentimentality, and with the need to appear cool, unfeeling and even coarse. Many characters are lonely, insecure and nervous, and their insecurity carries them on flights of imagination that Mansfield interlays in the text, combining the characters' internal monologues with the third-person narration. And there is death. Death appears in every story, sometimes as a central theme in the story, sometimes as a touch that darkens the frivolity of the characters' lives. Love is never pure and innocent, but is rather something that happens despite the power struggles and tensions that occur in every relationship between characters.
It's difficult for me to choose stories that I like or dislike. They are all parts of a whole, illustrating similar themes that occur at different points in the characters' lives, at different ages, different circumstances and different places, with largely similar facets touching the lives of the vastly different characters.
Though the stories are unrelated, each feels like a part of a cohesive whole, because of the common motifs and themes and run through them. All are set in either New Zealand or England, the two places where Katherine Mansfield lived, and contain beautiful descriptions of flowers, gardens, sunrises, sunsets, mist, and the sea. They are atmospheric, and they have a detached, hazy wistful poignancy.
Katherine Mansfield grew up in New Zealand with three sisters and a brother. Her parents were somewhat neglectful and left her largely in the care of her grandmother. She moved to England but never truly settled down in the literary circles there. Virginia Woolf was a close friend, but while the two respected and enjoyed each other's company, there were also jealous of each other and occasionally bad-mouthed each other behind their backs. Her marriage was happy on the outside but tempestuous in reality. In her last years, she contracted tuberculosis, and while fighting death wrote several books, including this one.
These themes from Mansfield's life replay in the stories in the book. Neglectful mothers let their children grow up pampered and with little direct parental supervision. Young, pretty girls from upper class families, navigate the reality of the outside world. Some, with scornful attitudes, bully men and their own parents. Some struggle with social hierarchies, outwardly doing what is "right" and befitting of their social status (i.e. disdaining the lower classes), but inwardly yearning for the freedom and innocence of their childhood. People struggle with their inner soft feelings of love, sensitivity and sentimentality, and with the need to appear cool, unfeeling and even coarse. Many characters are lonely, insecure and nervous, and their insecurity carries them on flights of imagination that Mansfield interlays in the text, combining the characters' internal monologues with the third-person narration. And there is death. Death appears in every story, sometimes as a central theme in the story, sometimes as a touch that darkens the frivolity of the characters' lives. Love is never pure and innocent, but is rather something that happens despite the power struggles and tensions that occur in every relationship between characters.
It's difficult for me to choose stories that I like or dislike. They are all parts of a whole, illustrating similar themes that occur at different points in the characters' lives, at different ages, different circumstances and different places, with largely similar facets touching the lives of the vastly different characters.