Ideal weather for tea

Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story The Garden Party provides summery inspiration for Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel writer Kristyna Wentz-Graff who includes recipes for making club sandwiches, date scones and pavlova as part of a monthly book-themed menu. “While the opening line of [Virginia Woolf’s] Mrs Dalloway is very good (‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’), it doesn’t quite top the opening for The Garden Party: ‘And after all the weather was ideal.'” There is so much that is fine and economical in Mansfield’s stories that it would seem superfluous if they were stretched into novels. What Woolf did in a couple of hundred pages, Mansfield was able to achieve in just a couple of dozen.” The story includes reference to Mansfield’s Heroes page on nzedge.com calling it, “A fascinating analysis, from a New Zealand perspective, about Mansfield’s influence as a writer and New Zealanders’ somewhat ambivalent feelings toward her”.