Written during the final stages of her illness, The Garden Party and Other Stories is full of a sense of urgency and was Katherine Mansfields last collection to be published during her lifetime. The fifteen stories, many of them set in her native New Zealand, vary in length and tone from the opening story, At the Bay, a vivid, impressionistic evocation of family life, to the short, sharp sketch Miss Brill, in which a lonely womans precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour, these stories reveal Mansfields supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.