Volume 1 - Issue 4, November - December 2025

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party exemplify the modernist exploration of female consciousness, narrative form, and social ritual in early 20th-century British literature. Their works engage deeply with themes of identity, gender roles, and symbolic death, employing innovative narrative techniques that challenge traditional storytelling. Ann L. McLaughlin (1978) highlights a profound professional and artistic connection between Woolf and Mansfield, quoting Mansfield’s own words: “We have got the SAME job, VIRGINIA” – a testament to their shared literary aims despite the eventual cooling of their personal relationship (McLaughlin, 1978, p. 369). McLaughlin argues that both writers simultaneously explored new narrative territories, such as feminine sensibility, the perspective of the child, symbolic transformation, and the ambivalence toward adult responsibilities, that reveal the depth of their interrelated artistic visions. This essay builds on McLaughlin’s insights to analyze how Woolf and Mansfield’s works dialogically examine female identity as performative, the social function of the party as a ritual space, and the treatment of death as a symbolic rupture - illuminating the shared modernist aesthetics and socio-cultural critiques embedded in their narratives. Even though one text was written before the other, this intertextual reading is not just about one directly influencing the other. Instead, it looks at how both stories share similar themes and ideas, which helps readers to see how they reflect and shape each other. This deepens the understanding of how they deal with gender, ritual, and death.