The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield

 

Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf, “We have got the same job, Virginia, & it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both, quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing. We are you know; there’s no denying it.” 

Woolf, as far as I know, didn't deny it. In fact, she wrote: “I was jealous of [Mansfield's] writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.” Woolf, it should be noted, was not known for praising her contemporaries.

One can see why she felt this way about Mansfield whose stories are each little gems, made more gem-like by the author's fastidiousness in avoiding crude effects. Unremarkable people are observed, and things and animals almost as much as people. The people do their best. There is never a big bang or clanking epiphany at the end. Rather, there is a hint that things probably won't change, life, for better or worse, will go on.

(Pictured above is the edition I read. The cover is a detail from a painting by by Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell. I bought it used years ago for ¥50. It was so cheap because it has been adorned with a student's notes and reminders, inside the front cover, about important dates in the university calendar. A bookmark fell out of it which featured a calendar for 1977.) 

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