The Garden Party

, to allow the most mundane remark to have a strange darting power. I

The visible world in her stories both conceals and discloses layers of emotion, often in the same phrase or the same sentence. She uses details as hidden implications. She never forces a thing or an object to stand for a feeling, or allows it to have more resonance than tact will permit. Rather, she lets what her characters notice console them and distract them, while also allowing the reader to understand and know what is, for the moment, being sidelined or ignored. Mansfield has a way of hovering before she swoops so that the hovering becomes her great subject and the swooping is often ungainly and oddly pointless, or much too late. The prey has moved on, or changed its shape.

for many years, she herself died in 1923 at the age of thirty-four, a year after The Garden Party, her third volume of stories, was published.)

the story resumes, the level of feeling is ambiguous and complex and gnarled, filled with the ironies and puzzlements that are Mansfield’s hallmarks.

Mansfield is more interested in strangeness, fickleness, than she is in direct or easy drama

Nothing is simple in the darting, twisted emotions that Mansfield allows her characters to suffer or indeed entertain. She specializes in brilliant beginnings to her stories, the rhythm urgent and the diction filled with the pure aura of voice.

It is all doomed. Mansfield has a way with making scenes like this, on which everything depends, both desperately gloomy and oddly funny and many shades in between. Part of this arises from her use of ambiguous detail.