Top Highlights

• The Sheridans’ estate in “The Garden Party” is based on Mansfield’s own childhood home on Tinakori Road in Wellington
• When she returned to New Zealand in 1906, she just as quickly became dissatisfied with the routine of endless social functions and empty courtship that her parents expected her to undertake; it is this period in her life—Mansfield’s dissatisfaction with her privileged, cloistered upbringing—that “The Garden Party” most recalls.
• . In 1917, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but her remaining years proved her most prolific, yielding two short story collections and all of her best-known work.
• The Garden Party” was written in the shadow (both historical and moral) of World War I. The death of Mansfield’s younger brother Leslie by a prematurely detonated grenade during a World War I training drill in Belgium devastated the author and may have influenced her treatment of death in “The Garden Party.”

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