The Garden Party

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the bulleted outlines below. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Using the setting of a garden party, Mansfield explores the idea of class consciousness from the perspective of a well-to-do family.

• How is Laura’s awareness of her class different from her family’s? (topic sentence)
• Find three examples in which Laura exhibits an understanding of class consciousness.
• How does Laura’s journey of self-awareness throughout the story speak to the larger theme of Class Distinction and Class Consciousness?

2. As a coming-of-age story, “The Garden Party” presents the ability to exhibit empathy toward others as a marker of adulthood.

• For Laura, how does empathy relate to maturity? (topic sentence)
• Identify at least three moments when Laura shows empathy, and explore how this development helps propel her to the next stage of life.