Katherine Mansfield’s story collection The Garden Party was published in 1922, following on from her 1920 collection, Bliss. This chapter focuses on the story “Bliss” from the point of view of T.S. Eliot’s 1933 denunciation of her work (alongside that of Lawrence and Joyce) as “heretical.” It proposes that Eliot’s denunciation marks an important moment in literary criticism’s movement towards cultural critique. For Eliot, Mansfield and her fellows were heretics because they broke with the Christian underpinnings of European culture, and for that reason, concepts like orthodoxy and heresy (not just tradition) are required to respond to them. For Eliot, Mansfield’s heresy consisted of her failure to adhere to the Christian ethos as well as, more profoundly, to a stable relation between writing and living. Of course, it is difficult for modern academic critics to concur with Eliot’s judgement, which can, nonetheless, help us appreciate Mansfield’s writing’s full force.