SOURCE: “Non-Identical Twins: Nature and ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Grave,’” in The Comparatist, Vol. 12, May, 1988, pp. 58–66.

In the following essay, Bell provides a detailed comparison of Katherine Mansfield's “The Garden Party” and Porter's “The Grave.”

From certain points of view “The Garden Party” and “The Grave” are so alike as to be all too easily confused. Even their authors can be mistaken for each other. Katherine Mansfield and Katherine Anne Porter, besides having similar names, led circumstantially similar lives. Their careers overlapped in time, although Mansfield died young; they shared relatively privileged backgrounds; they came from outlands to the centers of culture after breaking with their families; they had unstable relationships with men; they traveled widely; they gave steady outputs of fiction but received unsteady inputs of acclaim. Mansfield was British, Porter, American; yet they can frequently be found mentioned together, as if they were literary sisters...