SOURCE: Darrohn, Christine. “‘Blown to Bits!’: Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Garden-Party’ and the Great War.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3 (fall 1998): 513-39.

In the following essay, Darrohn contends that “The Garden Party” explores issues of class and gender as well as the devastating impact of World War I on Mansfield's generation.

“Blown to bits!”

That is how Katherine Mansfield, still in shock just a few days after learning of her brother's death in the war, described him to a friend. Twenty-one-year-old Leslie “Chummie” Beauchamp had been stationed in France for less than a month when on 7 October 1915, as he was giving a hand grenade demonstration, a defective grenade blew up in his hand with a force so strong it killed both himself and his sergeant (Alpers 183). Mansfield's succinct description of her brother's death is brusque and colloquial but also literally true of uncountable soldiers who fought in the Great War...