The garden party and other stories Book

And as I got this collection from my son for Christmas, I had to let it jump the queue.

As it rushed past the pile of waiting, bitterly frustrated heavy and important novels, it winked cheerfully. What is it to a Katherine Mansfield short story that other books, in my possession for decades, have an important message to deliver? After all, she delights by pointing at the small, private gestures and parallel existences without judging either more than necessary.

A successful garden party coincides with a fatal accident, leaving a young woman a widow with many small children in a poverty-stricken street. A first ball offers a moment of insight into future boredom, only to wipe out the deeper understanding immediately again, not to spoil the moment. A work life spent creating an ideal family nears its exhaustion, a woman faces rejection and rehabilitation within an hour of perfect terror, another thinks about choices made in life, for service, against marriage. Would the opposite have made her happier, unhappier, different, the same? Who knows.

Katherine Mansfield, the only author of whose writing Virginia Woolf claimed to have been jealous, moves between social classes, age groups, and gender with the ease of a truly great and careful observer. She moves from grief to happiness and worry, and back again, creating a microcosm of perfect accuracy wherever she lets her mind stop to describe in a few words a world complete in its complex relationships.

What a delightful way to close my reading year - by finally getting to read an author long postponed, and then be blown away by her lighthearted depth.