Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” describes the Sheridan family’s Wellington, New Zealand, summer picnic garden party.
The day is early summer, the weather ideal, the air warm and windless, and the blue sky has a veil of gold: “They could not have had a perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it—Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.”
The party is important for sixteen-year-old Laura, who is given only nominal responsibilities. At the end of the party, Laura is asked to deliver a basket of cream puffs, an act of noblesse oblige to a grieving family of the worker killed during the party’s set-up. It seemed a perfect day for a picnic, but death haunts it. The experience numbs Laura.
Featured Image: Mansfield’s residence in Wellington, New Zealand, circa 1907. The probable site of the garden party that triggered Mansfield’s memory.
See Katherine Mansfield. “The Garden Party.” In The Garden Party and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1922