'The sharp impersonality, the clarity and concision of her best stories made them genuinely startling. Her voice was the voice of modernity, bright, short-winded, sometimes whimsical, often ambiguous' - Claire Tomalin
The seventy-three short stories and fifteen unfinished fragments contained in this volume represent the whole range of Katherine Mansfield's writing. Contemporary critics compared her to Chekhov in her treatment of apparently trifling incidents and her symboliv use of objects to convey powerful atmosphere. These are not tales of violent emotions or dextrous plot: they are sensitive revelations of human behaviour in quite ordinary situations, through which we can glimpse a powerful, and sometimes cruelly pessimistic, view of the human lot.
As W. E. Williams wrote in his Introduction to The Garden Party and Other Stories: 'She could discern in a trivial event or an insignificant person some moving revelation or motive or destiny ... There is an abundance of that tender and delicate art which penetrates the appearances of life to discover the elusive causes of happiness and grief.'
