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by Katherine Mansfield (Author)
Written during the final stages of her illness, "The Garden Party and Other Stories" is full of a sense of urgency and was Katherine Mansfield's last collection to be published during her lifetime. The fifteen stories, many of them set in her native New Zealand, vary in length and tone from the opening story, "At the Bay, " a vivid impressionistic evocation of family life, to the short, sharp sketch "Mrs. Brill, " in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour, these stories reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige. Kathleen Mansfield Murry (14 October 1888 - 9 January 1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917 she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker and she was a cousin of the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had two older sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother, born in 1894. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, became the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted. Her grandfather was Arthur Beauchamp, who briefly represented the Picton electorate in Parliament.In 1893 the Mansfield family moved from Thorndon to Karori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood. She used some of her memories of this time as an inspiration for the "Prelude" story.....
