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A review by casparb
The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
! Splendid work I've been warm to Katherine Mansfield since that charming moment she decided T.S. Eliot was 'attractive yet pathetic'. I think there's a familiar ring to these stories for most people that Early Modernist posture within the upper-middle classes but I think like Woolf and Djuna Barnes, KM manages to posit her authorial voice as just askew - it doesn't feel one gazes the navel.
Perhaps its the sometime vicious attitude to men (and justly postured much agreed) - the overawing melancholy? Her feminism does appear quite sophisticated for the era: both sympathetic and critical, a surprising class-consciousness built in. My general feeling is that Mansfield excels at endings. This is where all of her tales do their work & it does feel in a few of the weaker ones that they exist purely to carry one to the final paragraph.
Enjoyed what appeared to be a critical re-interpretation of Jane Austen. The Garden Party itself wonderful & very Chekhov. There are weaker stories here but none too egregious & it feels impressively cohesive well done Katherine xxx
Perhaps its the sometime vicious attitude to men (and justly postured much agreed) - the overawing melancholy? Her feminism does appear quite sophisticated for the era: both sympathetic and critical, a surprising class-consciousness built in. My general feeling is that Mansfield excels at endings. This is where all of her tales do their work & it does feel in a few of the weaker ones that they exist purely to carry one to the final paragraph.
Enjoyed what appeared to be a critical re-interpretation of Jane Austen. The Garden Party itself wonderful & very Chekhov. There are weaker stories here but none too egregious & it feels impressively cohesive well done Katherine xxx