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Shop nowThe Garden Party
Narrator
Marguerite Gavin
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Length
6 hours 42 minutes
Language
English
The fifteen stories collected in this volume demonstrate the genius of a woman who, in her own short lifetime, was compared to Chekhov. The tales are sensitive revelations of human behavior in ordinary situations. With careful, quiet observation, Mansfield illuminates complicated relationships and profound, often troubling ideas. Her stories often feature young women in the process of maturity, confronting for the first time some of the realities of life.
In the title story, a young woman’s garden party coincides with the death of a working-class neighbor, bringing a brush of mortality and realism into her carefully constructed plans and ideals. Her difficulty in fully realizing the seriousness of the event is typical of Mansfield's ironic world.
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and settled in Europe to finish her education. She published her first short fiction in The New Age, then in Rhythm, whose editor, the British writer and critic John Middleton Murry, she soon married. Her writing contributed to the development of the stream of consciousness technique and to the modernist use of multiple viewpoints, and her style has had a powerful influence on subsequent writers in the same genre.
Marguerite Gavin has recorded over three hundred audiobooks in numerous genres. Her work has won AudioFile Earphones and Publishers Weekly Listen-Up awards as well as a nomination for the prestigious Audie award. AudioFile magazine says "Marguerite Gavin is an accomplished storyteller . . . with a sonorous voice, rich and full of emotion, she easily delivers wry humor and moves smoothly from accent to accent, recalling multiple characters perfectly." Gavin divides her time as an actress between the sound studio and classical theater. She lives in the Washington, DC area.
Reviews
“[Marguerite Gavin’s] voices are marvelous; presenting British accents of every description from cockney to Queen, with clear delineation between characters male and female, is a skill especially important in these character-driven tales. Her sound effects (birdcalls, running water, etc.) are perfect, and she sings in such a lovely clear soprano that the listener wishes there were more songs in the stories…Highly recommended.”
“With the timing and phrasing of a musician, Marguerite Gavin narrates this last-published collection of Katherine Mansfield's short stories. Gavin has a lovely singing voice…[she] reads with a great deal of enthusiasm and expression.”
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