I always think of ‘The Garden Party’ as a perfect story of epiphany. Like Joyce’s ‘Araby’, it introduces its protagonist in place, time and milieu, and ends at the moment she learns a new and irreversible lesson about the world, a lesson that does not need to be named outright because the story up to that point has carefully made the substance of that epiphany legible:
‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life—’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood.
‘Isn’t it, darling?’ said Laurie.’
When I first read this story 10 years ago, I understood Laura’s epiphany to be about death – the accidental death of a working-class neighbour on the day of her family’s garden party causes the young protagonist to realise that death looms over life and that she too will die one day – and missed the extent to which the story is about her burgeoning class-consciousness. From the beginning of the story, when she is sent out to instruct the workmen assembling the marquee and disarmed by their friendliness, to the end, when she has to confront the squalid living conditions of her neighbours, the story is about her coming to understand not only that death always looms over life, nor that some people live well at the expense of others living poorly, but that death looms more closely and meanly over the lives of the poor than over those of the wealthy.
First published in The Westminster Gazette in 1922. Collected in The Garden Party and Other Stories, Constable and Robinson, 1922). Available to read online here
A Personal Anthology 