In the Library
The Garden Party
Katherine Mansfield, 1922
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 5k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
And after all the weather was ideal.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Woolf does the same thing with a party and news of a stranger's death arriving mid-evening, but follows the hostess all the way through her own day.
£1.99
The Dead
James Joyce
_The Dead_ does the same thing with a warm party and a sudden sense of mortality, but lets the snow fall over all of Ireland.
£1.99
About the book
The weather is ideal, and Katherine Mansfield wants you to feel every inch of it: a cloudless morning, roses that seem to know they are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties, workmen arriving with canvas on their backs. Laura Sheridan goes out to show them where the marquee should stand, still holding her bread-and-butter, and falls half in love with their easy kindness, wishing she had workmen for friends instead of the silly boys she dances with. Then news comes up from the cottages at the bottom of the hill. A carter has been thrown from his horse and killed, and Laura wants everything stopped. Her family finds her absurd; her mother settles a black hat trimmed with gold daisies on her head, and in the mirror Laura meets a charming girl. In a few thousand words Mansfield catches the sweet, shaming ease with which a lovely afternoon talks a conscience round. The last steps take Laura down the hill with a basket of leftovers, still in that hat, toward something she will have no words for.