The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield
The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield
List: $16.95 | Sale: $11.87
Club: $8.47

The Garden Party

Author: Katherine Mansfield

Narrator: Marguerite Gavin

Unabridged: 6 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/12/2008

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories

Synopsis

The fifteen stories collected in this volume demonstrate the genius of a woman who, in her own short lifetime, was compared to Chekhov. The tales are sensitive revelations of human behavior in ordinary situations. With careful, quiet observation, Mansfield illuminates complicated relationships and profound, often troubling ideas. Her stories often feature young women in the process of maturity, confronting for the first time some of the realities of life.In the title story, a young woman’s garden party coincides with the death of a working-class neighbor, bringing a brush of mortality and realism into her carefully constructed plans and ideals. Her difficulty in fully realizing the seriousness of the event is typical of Mansfield's ironic world.

About Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and settled in Europe to finish her education. She published her first short fiction in The New Age, then in Rhythm, whose editor, the British writer and critic John Middleton Murry, she soon married. Her writing contributed to the development of the stream of consciousness technique and to the modernist use of multiple viewpoints, and her style has had a powerful influence on the development of the short story form. 

About Marguerite Gavin

Marguerite Gavin is a seasoned theater veteran, a five-time nominee for the prestigious Audie Award, and the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones and Publishers Weekly awards. She has been an actor, director, and audiobook narrator for her entire professional career. With over four hundred titles to her credit, her narration spans nearly every genre, from nonfiction to mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and children’s fiction. AudioFile magazine says, “Marguerite Gavin…has a sonorous voice, rich and full of emotion.”

Reviews

Goodreads review by s.penkevich on April 17, 2025

I often think of the best short stories as being perfectly fine tuned machines. Like in old cartoons where the watchmaker opens the back of some golden timepiece that counts the heartbeats of life with impeccable precision to reveal the intricate innards of gears that must be adjusted to nearly impo......more

Goodreads review by Vit on March 23, 2024

The book is a collection of fine expressionistic short stories… At the Bay… A summer day spent by the sea… Adults and children… Talks, games and thoughts… It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children. It wasn’t true. She, for one, could prove that wrong. She was broken,......more

Goodreads review by Violet on October 08, 2016

Piazza del Duomo is my least favourite place in Florence. I always hurry through it. Probably San Marco (except at four in the morning) and St Peters are my least favourite places in, respectively, Venice and Rome so I guess I just don’t respond very well to the grandiose. I prefer what’s smaller, m......more

Goodreads review by Georgia on July 12, 2023

If there was just one sentence I could save from a fire, it would be this one from The Garden Party: "And the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed." Here is life in all its order. Rhythmic in sound and symbol, hushed as a prayer. Read it again out loud. Though "lo......more

Quotes

“[Marguerite Gavin’s] voices are marvelous; presenting British accents of every description from cockney to Queen, with clear delineation between characters male and female, is a skill especially important in these character-driven tales. Her sound effects (birdcalls, running water, etc.) are perfect, and she sings in such a lovely clear soprano that the listener wishes there were more songs in the stories…Highly recommended.” Library Journal

“With the timing and phrasing of a musician, Marguerite Gavin narrates this last-published collection of Katherine Mansfield's short stories. Gavin has a lovely singing voice…[she] reads with a great deal of enthusiasm and expression.” AudioFile

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