The Bildungsroman Project
coming-of-age since the 18th century
the garden party
by katherine mansfield
1922
Considered by many to be one of the most perfectly crafted short stories in English, "The Garden Party" tells of an aristocratic young New Zealand women who encounters class, death, and her emerging adulthood, all on the same festive afternoon. The narrative's combination of epiphany and paralysis, along with its compellingly open-ended conclusion, render Mansfield's tale a classic example of literary modernism. Its subtle retelling of the Persephone myth underscores that while "The Garden Party" is distinctly modern in setting and style, its central questions are as old as civilization itself.
