As a story it draws attention to words like ‘perfect’ and ‘extravagant,’ as if to ask what they really mean. It takes issue with, and at the same time itself creates with perfect mimicry, the rich self absorption of its characters, ‘that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream’ eaten right after breakfast. On the surface it acts as a story about ‘these absurd class distinctions’. But this is simply its surface issue. At the same time as it dwells on the comforts of and satirises the surrealities of wearing the right kind of hat, it asks why and how we are unable to deal with that quite ‘other’ reality. ‘A man lay dead, and she couldn’t realize it.’

The story also revels in how easily people become other people’s tropes. ‘“My dear!” trilled Kitty Maitland, “aren’t [the green-coated band] too like frogs for words? You ought to have arranged them round the pond with the conductor in the middle on a leaf.”’ Then it demonstrates how we become tropes of (and to) ourselves, and how attractive, and erroneous, it is to make life a mere trope – or a perfect garden party. By the end, Laura, the main character, has been party to a different reality, one so far beyond social trope that the words for it don’t even exist.

‘The Garden-Party’, which became the title story of the last of Mansfield’s collections published when she was alive, was written in 1921 in Switzerland when she was very ill; the tuberculosis in her lungs (now thought to have been caught from her friend, D. H. Lawrence) had been diagnosed in 1918. Her last five years would be spent travelling, with Baker or Murry, sometimes with both, in search of a cure, and writing as fast as possible against the clock of her own body, when even speaking was often near-impossible since it brought on unrelenting bouts of coughing. All those playful and spirited and adventurous versions of self she’d flitted between since adolescence were ‘shackled’ by illness, ‘rather like being a beetle shut in a book, so shackled that one can do nothing but lie down – and even to lie down becomes a kind of agony’. 23

In Switzerland she wrote, urgently and side by side, stories for which the American magazine The Sphere would pay enough money to cover rent and medical fees, and stories that would stand as some of her very best work: for instance, ‘At the Bay’, ‘The Garden-Party’, ‘The Doll’s House’, and an extraordinary fragment, ‘A Married Man’s Story’ (and that this rich-voiced, promising piece of fiction remained unfinished is just one of the devastating losses, to us, of her early death). The moneyspinning stories for The Sphere, like ‘Sixpence’, ‘Her First Ball’, and ‘An Ideal Family’, light-seeming stories by which she didn’t set much store, are invested with impatience, urgency, a haunting prescience of death, and the kinds of unsettling questions that an average magazine story didn’t usually raise.

Bliss had been published in 1920, followed in 1922 by The Garden-Party, which contained ‘At The Bay’ and the title story, alongside some of her finest work from just before her time in Montana, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, ‘Life of Ma Parker’, ‘Miss Brill’. But in 1922 she stopped being able to work. She wrote her last truly powerful story, ‘The Fly’, in February, and her last complete story, ‘The Canary’, in July. Hoping she might have found another way to cure herself, she signed into the Russian guru Gurdjieff’s commune in Fontainebleau, hoping his concentration on the healing and the wholeness of the mind would free her from the shackle of the body.

Mansfield threw herself into the regime with all the energy she had left, milking the commune’s cows, peeling its vegetables, trying to learn as much Russian as she needed to tell her fellow members how cold she was in her room. ‘My blue dress is in large holes,’ she wrote in what would be her final letter to Ida. ‘Those cashmere cardigans look as if rats have gnawed them. As to my fur coat — it’s like a wet London cat. The last time I was in the stable I caught one of the goats nibbling it’. 24 She is comic to the last, even about her own appalled sense of being eaten away.

Her spirit was awesome. When Murry came to visit in January 1923, Mansfield tried to run upstairs to show him how well she was. This last display of vitality against all odds brought on a bad haemorrhage and she died later that evening, on January 9 1923.

Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, for all its innovation, reads surprisingly easily. Though her concern with consciousness and psychological relativity, her projection of the notion of self as both fragmented and fluid, the fixation with displacement in her stories and her vision of aesthetic shape itself as negotiable, are all clearly identifiable as modernist concerns, she’s what you might call an unassuming modernist, a sly, laughing kind of modernist. It’s almost as if she’d never want to be caught being pompous, or in any way too present in her stories (or as if to us now, nearly a hundred years later, unwilling to be caught taking any single literary fashion or ‘ism’ too much to heart).

Beside the other great modernist fiction writers, her work seems to go out of its way not to demand of its reader. It isn’t marked with any of the self-conscious experimenta of, for instance, contemporaneous work by Joyce, alongside which it appears quite conventional; and alongside the meditative, spare and rich, mono-voice and poetics of much of Woolf’s fiction after Night and Day, Mansfield’s work seems almost theatrical, like a transcription of social performance. She often used the verb to ‘perform’ when referring to the act of her own writing. ‘Now I must play my part,’ she tells herself, steeling herself to write ‘The Aloe’ after her brother’s death.

In fact, performance is a central part of Mansfield’s aesthetic. Her stories are full of references to theatre, roles, acting, and the marked differences between theatre and ‘reality’.