The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [0]
KATHERINE MANSFIELD was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888 and died in Fontainebleau in 1923. She came to London for the latter part of her education, and could not settle down back in Wellington society; in 1908 she left again for Europe, never to return. Her first writing (apart from some early sketches) was published in The New Age, to which she became a regular contributor. Her first book, In a German Pension, was published in 1911. In 1912 she began to write for Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry, whom she eventually married. She was a conscious modernist, an experimenter in life and writing, and mixed with others of her kind, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. With ‘Prelude’ in 1916 she evolved her distinctive voice as a writer of short fiction. By 1917 she had contracted tuberculosis, and from that time led a wandering life in search of health. Her second book of stories, Bliss, was published in 1921, and her third, The Garden Party, appeared a year later. It was the last book to be published in her lifetime. After her death, two more collections of stories were published, as well as her Letters and later her Journal.
Virginia Woolf wrote of Katherine Mansfield: ‘She was for ever pursued by her dying, and had to press on through stages that should have taken years in ten minutes… She had a quality I adored and needed; I think her sharpness and reality – her having knocked about with prostitutes and so on, whereas I had always been respectable – was the thing I wanted then. I dream of her often…’
LORNA SAGE was born in Wales, graduated from Durham and Birmingham universities, and was a Professor at the University of East Anglia. She reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review, and was the author of Bad Blood. She also wrote on Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Christina Stead, and was the editor of Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies for Penguin Books. Lorna Sage died in 2001.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
The Garden Party
and Other Stories
Edited with an Introduction and notes by
LORNA SAGE
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Constable and Co. 1922
This edition first published in Penguin Books 1997
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
Reissued in Penguin Classics 2007
2
Introduction and notes copyright © Lorna Sage, 1997
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the pubisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193718-2
Contents
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
THE GARDEN PARTY AND OTHER STORIES
Notes
Introduction
Fables and fairy tales are age-old and used to be passed around by word of mouth, but short stories are a modern invention and