Style

Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party" employs a style that is distinctly modern in its use of impressionistic detail and stream-ofconsciousness narrative method. These stylistic features also characterize the works of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and other innovative writers of the 1920s and 1930s.

The narrative begins in "the middle of things"— In media res. The narrative voice describes the scene in a casual and immediate manner which at once establishes an intimacy with the reader— "And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for the garden party if they had ordered it." The almost confidential presentation of such objective facts establishes the narrative voice as the central consciousness of the story—one that perceives and interprets experience and that also, for most of the story, melds with the character of Laura. As the reader is...