![]() ![]() ![]() It seems to have just about everything - endless quantities of plants, a significant piece of music, failures of communication within a bourgeois family, incomprehension between rich and poor, the well-intentioned action that is undermined by its initiator's realisation that she's being patronising. The title-story is one of Mansfield's most anthologised stories, so you'll have read it twenty years ago and answered exam questions on Mansfield's death-imagery, but it's worth coming back to. The Garden Party - like Bliss - is dominated by an extended story drawn from the author's childhood, in this case "At the bay", where the family we met in "Prelude" are staying in a summer-house by the sea, and once again we discover mostly through indirect signs - the plants, the beach, the play of the children - the invisible rifts that run between the members of the apparently harmonious family group. ![]()
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