house and the poorer homes]. True, they were far too near. They were the greatest possible eyesore, and they had no right to be in that neighborhood at all.

Her mother talks Laura out of her stubborn insistence on cancelling the party, even though it is beautiful day and only a poor man who has been killed, by offering her a beautiful new hat to wear. Laura is so charmed by her own striking appearance that she wants to be seen at the party.

Afterwards, as compensation, Laura takes a basket of leftover pastries to the cottage of the dead man's family. She is embarrassed from the start, knowing it is tawdry to offer party leftovers to a family in grief. She is shocked and feels out of place as she approaches the cottage. She is ashamed of her new hat, which now seems hopelessly extravagant against the poverty around her. Once inside the cottage, with its small, poorly furnished rooms, she becomes even more uncomfortable:

Laura only wanted to get out, to get away.

Laura emerges from her experience with a new sense that the class chasm is not one that can be easily crossed but also confused about what it is exactly that she feels about it.

The meaning of this story is very closely intertwined with Mansfield's reasons for writing it. In this story she seems to explore the issue of class and how class consciousness is conveyed and taught. This is shown primarily through the character of Laura, who, as the preparations for the party are being made, thinks class distinctions are something that she does not feel "not a bit, not an atom." However, during the course of the story, when she hears about the neighbour who has died and she tries to get her mother to call off the garden party, and is seduced by the hat that she is given to wear, she is being schooled to adopt the mannerisms and prejudices of her class, part of which is to regard the working class as being less important. When she goes to visit the body of Mr Scott, she experiences something of an epiphany when she sees just how frivolous her concerns about the party were:

What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy... happy... All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.

Note how the imagined contentness of the dead body contrasts strongly with Laura's own feelings of restlessness and class angst. She, when confronted with the dead body of Mr Scott, feels incredibly guilty for her unnecessary concerns with the garden party, expressed in the "baskets and lace frocks" that have dominated so much of Laura's attention. The story brilliantly ends with the reader being unsure about what Laura is going to do with the truth she has realised. The story therefore concerns primarily the issues of class and how this is something that becomes second nature to people.

Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden Party" was published in 1922, but the story's Sheridan estate is based on Mansfield's childhood home in New Zealand. Given that she moved to London in 1903, the story is probably set around 1900—and surely before the First World War. The fashions, especially of hat Laura wears, seems pre-war:

her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon.

Also, the amount of spending money the Sheridans have almost certainly indicates the pre-World War I period, as does the number of servants. The text mentions the "green baize" door which typically separated the servant's quarters from the rest of the house, and there is no mention of the servant problem that became severe after the war ended. The story, therefore, can be set prior to 1914 in what people were already looking back at in the 1920s nostalgically as an opulent era, before inflation ate away people's wealth. However, the class system described would still have been in place.