The Garden Party
About this audiobook
The fifteen stories collected in this volume demonstrate the genius of a woman who, in her own short lifetime, was compared to Chekhov. The tales are sensitive revelations of human behavior in ordinary situations. With careful, quiet observation, Mansfield illuminates complicated relationships and profound, often troubling ideas. Her stories often feature young women in the process of maturity, confronting for the first time some of the realities of life.
In the title story, a young woman’s garden party coincides with the death of a working-class neighbor, bringing a brush of mortality and realism into her carefully constructed plans and ideals. Her difficulty in fully realizing the seriousness of the event is typical of Mansfield's ironic world.
About the author
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and settled in Europe to finish her education. She published her first short fiction in The New Age, then in Rhythm, whose editor, the British writer and critic John Middleton Murry, she soon married. Her writing contributed to the development of the stream of consciousness technique and to the modernist use of multiple viewpoints, and her style has had a powerful influence on subsequent writers in the same genre.
Marguerite Gavin is a seasoned theater veteran, a five-time nominee for the prestigious Audie Award, and the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones and Publishers Weekly awards. Marguerite has been an actor, director, and audiobook narrator for her entire professional career, and has over four hundred titles to her credit.
