Introduction

My discovery in 2019 of several forgotten stories almost certainly by Katherine Mansfield, including ‘The Chorus Girl and the Tariff’, drew me towards a reappraisal of The Garden Party and Other Stories in the context of theatre. Theatrical, cinematic or performative tendencies in the writings of Mansfield have been examined by Gerri Kimber (2008), Delia da Sousa Correa (2011, 2013), Sarah Sandley (2011), Erika Baldt (2015) and Faye Harland (2020), and Claire Davison notes that, in Mansfield’s stories, ‘Cinema techniques are transposed back into writing, theatrical monologues and dialogues are re-mediatised as prose.’ To take one of many possible examples, the visual clarity of the story ‘Millie’ – published in the Blue Review in 1913 – is partially created by a cinematic cutting and splicing of short phrases: ‘and the furniture seemed to bulge and breathe … and listen, too. The clock – the ashes – and the venetian – and then again – something else, like steps in the back yard.’ Yet with no creative prose by Mansfield pertaining directly to theatre – at least before 1909, when Mansfield was reading G. K. Chesterton’s critical study, Charles Dickens, and when ‘The Chorus Girl and the Tariff’ was written – a reappraisal seems timely. To this end, I will examine ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the sixth story in The Garden Party collection, written in Menton, France, in February 1921.