It is impossible for me to think about Mrs. Dalloway without also thinking of ‘The Garden Party’ which should be recommendation enough. Mansfield’s story, like Woolf’s novel, is about death in the middle of a party, but instead of Clarissa and her middle-aged memories and longings we have Mansfield’s child protagonist Laura hovering between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, innocence and knowledge, life and death, wealth and poverty, witness, and denial. Written in prose like dappled sunlight and deep shadow.
First published in 1922 as a three-part serial in the Westminster Gazette and later collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Alfred A Knopf, Inc and widely anthologized and available, including at Project Gutenberg
A Personal Anthology 