By the end of the twentieth century, Katherine Mansfield had assumed her place with Edgar Allen Poe and Anton Chekhov as one of the worlds most admired and respected short story writers.
Her best-known stories, "The Garden Party," "Her First Ball," and "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," are widely appreciated and frequently anthologized as masterpieces of the short story form. One of a handful of writers whose names have become synonymous with British modernism, Mansfield was viewed by Virginia Woolf as her most formidable professional rival and fictionalized by D. H. Lawrence as the independent, artistic Gudrun Brangwen in his novel Women in Love. After her death from tuberculosis in 1923 at age thirty-four, her posthumous reputation was fueled by the tireless (but also self-serving) efforts of her editor and husband, John Middleton Murry.