The Garden Party

This book is a selection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), a British modernist woman writer born in New Zealand, translated by translator Wen Jieruo and belonging to the People's Literature Publishing House's "20th-Century Foreign Masters' Classics" series, containing 26 works including representative pieces such as "The Garden Party," "A Cup of Tea" and "The Fly." Mansfield wrote only short stories throughout her life; her career spanned barely more than a decade, yet she left behind more than eighty stories and was called "the Chekhov of the English-speaking world." She does not win readers through bizarre plots, but enters through everyday scenes such as afternoon tea, a garden party, an outing or a funeral, peeling back the subtle fluctuations of her characters' emotions layer by layer with delicate sensory description and freely shifting perspectives. The pieces are short and the syntax clean, yet often in an inadvertent moment they let readers see the cracks in life. Take "The Garden Party" as an example: the story revolves around a garden tea party being prepared—a well-off young girl, while arranging the marquee and trying on a hat, hears that a worker in the neighboring street has died in an accident, and begins to doubt whether the festivities should continue. The story thus touches on class, death and the experience of growing up, and is Mansfield's most frequently anthologized piece in English textbooks. This book gathers works from different periods of her career, allowing a fairly complete view of her exploration of the short-story form.