Selected Short Stories

by Virginia Woolf

'Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! ... Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard' Virginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling and thought, and recreating in words the 'swarm and confusion of life'. Defying categorization, the stories range from the more traditional narrative style of 'Solid Objects' through the fragile impressionism of 'Kew Gardens' to the abstract exploration of consciousness in 'The Mark on the Wall'. Edited with an introduction and notes by Sandra Kemp

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction, 20th Century, Modern Classics, Womens, Female Authors

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[Sean Barrs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf writes with an extreme level of precision; she is the absolute master of capturing the intensity of a single image.

As such, I think she is a far more talented short story writer than a novelist. A perfect short story, one with a precise form, expressive language and a meaningful allegory, is closer to poetry than it is to a novel. The language needs to be weighed carefully because just one sentence (or perhaps even just one word) can change the entire meaning of the piece: it has to be exact.

Woolf’s stories are perfectly on point.

I don’t think she writes plots very well (or, at least, I don’t seem to be able to engage with them.) She plays with words and images and in the short story form this is fantastic though when combined with a complex yet understated plot in a novel, it is very easy to become lost in the mirage of words she throws at her readers; her writing is heavily descriptive and sometimes this detracts from her longer pieces.

Here though it is wonderful, simply because the plots are so irrelevant. Kew Gardens is perhaps one of the finest short stories I have ever read: the story is one image, a glimpse into the mundane nature of a city garden. It is full of life and colour and people. As I read Woolf’s words I could see the flowers in all their hues. I could smell the petals and I could hear the voices of the citizens. I was there. The effect was a remarkable feat of writing.

"From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with sports of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end."



So consider me impressed. I will read the rest of her novels (eventually) and it will be interesting to see if my opinion remains the same.

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was my first exposure to Virginia Woolf's works and I enjoyed every line of the book.

Virginia Woolf is one of those modern authors who reshaped the way fiction is written; she really redefines the boundaries of fiction as the stories are more of sensations rather than well crafted traditional short stories. The stories are having more rhythmic sense rather than narrative, the stories have just loose sensations, which can be interpreted in so many different ways; Virginia Woolf is one of those authors who understand human psychology in true sense, she uses words with a precision of surgeon and webs those to create a vivid world of sensations and memories.

In her short fiction Woolf typically focused on minute physical detail and experimented with stream-of-consciousness techniques, interior monologue, and symbolism to capture the subjective workings of human thought.The elements of 'stream of consciousness' could be traced in the stories and those are used so effortlessly by the author as she understands human nature better than any human being. The precision of her words and her language captures the scope of the world, Woolf brings out the voice of objects on paper as if those objects are alive and have a voice of their own




A Haunted House: "The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple turned its yellow side. Yet, the moments after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung from the walls, pendants from the ceiling- what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest walls of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. 'Safe, safe, safe,'the pulse of house beat softly....."





'Monday or Tuesday' has loose web of words without narrative and the story can be interpreted in different ways-it can be considered as a cornerstone of literary modernism-

"Flaunted, leaf-light, drifting at corners, blown across the wheels, silver-splashed, home or not home, gathered, scattered, squandered in separate scales, swept up, down, torn, sunk, assembled–and truth?"






An unwritten novel:

Woolf has artistic imagination at work, raising doubts about its own creations, asking questions, and posing alternative interpretations; cancels those as invalid, mistaken interpretation, or rejects them as inadequate. She develops the narrative using all the uncertainties, mistakes, hesitations; the story can be sought as an example of meta-fiction- as the author uses experimental style to shaping fiction out of everyday observations and sensations.

"SUCH AN EXPRESSION of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes slide above the paper's edge to the poor woman's face–insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of–what?"

"Running it in and out, across and over, spinning a web through which God himself–hush, don't think of God! How firm the stitches are! You must be proud of your darning. Let nothing disturb her. Let the light fall gently, and the clouds show an inner vest of the first green leaf. Let the sparrow perch on the twig and shake the raindrop hanging to the twig's elbow.... Why look up? Was it a sound, a thought? Oh, heavens! Back again to the thing you did, the plate glass with the violet loops? But Hilda will come. Ignominies, humiliations, oh! Close the breach."







Kew Gardens:

In Kew Gardens, Woolf further expanded her experimental styles - the author has revoked human moods and philosophic reflections instead of traditional narratives.

"FROM THE OVAL-SHAPED flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July."






'The Mark on the Wall':

The story is an example of symbolism since the mark on the wall is symbolised to different things for ascertaining what that mark could be, but the narrator is never sure about it. This confusion about the identity of the mark on the wall can be interpreted as the confusion that people have in relation to the meaning of life-

"But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened.”

The narrator expects people to develop ideas of their own -“Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker”

In the last phase of story, the narrator takes about shedding off dogmas-" And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs.... How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections–if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack–if it were not for the Table of Precedency!"





Lappin and Lapinova:

The protagonist of the story, Rosalind constructs an alternative fantasy world where Ernest is a rabbit king called Lappin and she herself – a hare called Queen Lapinova since she couldn't adjust to her marriage.

"Rosalind had still to get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Thorburn. Perhaps she never would get used to the fact that she was Mrs. Ernest Anybody, she thought, as she sat in the bow window of the hotel looking over the lake to the mountains, and waited for her husband to come down to breakfast."

Woolf in a few pages does a brilliant job of depicting how subtle things can have a great effect on relationships. She shows us how delicate love can sometimes be.

"The golden table became a moor with the gorse in full bloom; the din of voices turned to one peal of lark’s laughter ringing down from the sky. It was a blue sky — clouds passed slowly. And they had all been changed — the Thorburns. She looked at her father-in-law, a furtive little man with dyed moustaches. His foible was collecting things — seals, enamel boxes, trifles from eighteenth-century dressing tables which he hid in the drawers of his study from his wife. Now she saw him as he was — a poacher, stealing off with his coat bulging with pheasants and partridges to drop them stealthily into a three-legged pot in his smoky little cottage. That was her real father-in-law — a poacher. And Celia, the unmarried daughter, who always nosed out other people’s secrets, the little things they wished to hide — she was a white ferret with pink eyes, and a nose clotted with earth from her horrid underground nosings and pokings. Slung round men’s shoulders, in a net, and thrust down a hole — it was a pitiable life — Celia’s; it was none of her fault. So she saw Celia. And then she looked at her mother-in-law — whom they dubbed The Squire. Flushed, coarse, a bully — she was all that, as she stood returning thanks, but now that Rosalind — that is Lapinova — saw her, she saw behind her the decayed family mansion, the plaster peeling off the walls, and heard her, with a sob in her voice, giving thanks to her children (who hated her) for a world that had ceased to exist..."




Overall, it can be said that Woolf's experiments with poetic style, her psychological focus, and her subjective point of view expanded the limits of time and perception within the framework of the short story, influencing and contributing significantly to the development of modern short fiction.

[Dolors · Rating 4 out of 5]

One can sense Woolf’s need to push the boundaries of fiction in these short stories more openly than in her novels. As she experiments with literary techniques and poetic resources in order to express the inexpressible, she captures the transience of the present moment and dissects its multiple perspectives through minute, exquisite description.
And so, a green glass can become a fantastic world where color and darkness fuse with the mood of the absent narrator, a passing reflection on a mirror entails the story of a lifetime, a mark on the wall invites the observant mind to meditate on existential issues. All of these transmutations and many others are bathed in alternating scathing humor and unsentimental yearning that add a sophisticated touch to the compilation.

Woolf’s magisterial use of the word has a double effect; that of giving sensory dimension to the most insignificant detail of everyday life and a matchless faculty to preserve what is naturally evanescent in spite of the merciless passage of time.
Like life itself, many of these tales lack a neat conclusion; they rather linger disquietingly into the mind of the mesmerized reader who tries to figure out what it is exactly that he has read.

“More rhythm than narrative”, that’s how Woolf herself describes her short stories. I would also add that she creates an aura around everyday life without disguising the tedium, the ordinariness of uneventful days wasted and gone down the drain and the obtuse isolation in which we mostly live. She prefers unadulterated reality rather than constructing a romanticized fiction out of it, and that’s the groundbreaking approach that combined with the experimental style of these short pieces of writing makes it possible to capture the intangible essence of a moment, the sensation of simply “being”. And I do feel that in our growingly frenetic days we are in high need to learn to empty our minds and just be, like a jar of flowers sitting gracefully on a table taking in the stray sunrays that go its way and simply is what it is. Maybe we’ll find some kind of peace when our inner and outer worlds, when the self and the other, cross boundaries and merge naturally. And that is exactly what it felt like to read Woof. Disquietingly peaceful.

[elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

GILVW (god i love virgina woolf)

i <3 virginia woolf and i dread a world where i have read every single one of her works

but i am going through Major Sadness right now so i am picking up a new book of hers.

[Piyangie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf is one of a kind. She doesn't write traditional stories that we are so used to reading. They are plotless for most of the time. Nevertheless, her beautiful writing, with her powerful wordplay, blending symbols and scenery, wonderfully paints the picture of our humdrum existence.

The collected short stories here too have similar characteristics. They are plotless, but the sensations she awakes through her allegory are mindblowing. Her words are so powerful and intense, and bring to life our mundane routines, the bygone conventions, the social views at the time, and women's position in society through reflections as if she's trying to tell a story through a picture. She weaves images and invokes sensations, and in combination creates odd yet delightful stories.

From the collection, Kew Gardens is what I loved the most. It is a reflective painting of life. The Mark on the Wall is Virginia's story as to how certain objects and images awaken thoughts and emotions in us. Lapin and Lapinova is an in-depth look into marital relationship. Solid Objects shows how we connect and anchor ourselves to objects to keep some stability in our fragile, ever-changing lives. Society is a scathing attack over patriarchy. The Haunted House is a beautiful portrait of past memories. I can go on and on, but I'll stop here and let you explore. :)

Virginia Woolf loved to experiment. The short stories highlight her amazing ability to experiment, bringing in different types of narrative forms and structures. Yet, even though she writes in different voices, such as narrative, musings, or reflections, and in new experimenting styles, each and every short story has a theme that is well explored. The combination doesn't exactly create the story form that we're so used to reading, yet, it creates enough story to capture the reader's interest.

I have nothing but praise for Virginia Woolf. She influences me as a woman as well as an artist. She makes me conscious of life, and her works have broadened my perspective on creativity. She is really a blessing to the literary world, and I feel so privileged to know her through her work.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have I read you right? But the human face - the human face at the top of the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more.

This collection is so admirably chosen that it's like a concentrated quintessence of Woolf's writings.

Moving from the more traditional form of 'A Society' which shows Woolf's often overlooked sense of humour and which is akin to her Night and Day ('O bother,' said Judith, who had been enquiring into scientific matters. 'I'm not in love and I'm longing to explain my measures for dispensing with prostitutes and fertilizing virgins by an Act of Parliament'), to more impressionist, abstract pieces, this traces Woolf's own developing manifesto for fiction.

Some of these pieces contest the concept of 'stories' - boundaries are fluid, there is no beginning, middle and end, voices emerge and then are submerged, consciousnesses are caught then fade out, and not everything is even viewed from the perspective of people. Places and spaces have longevity and some kind of stability which the ephemeral characters who pass through them do not, whether that's the house that is 'haunted' or Kew Gardens on a sunny day.

Subjectivity is focalised via 'The Mark on the Wall', and 'An Unwritten Novel' is in dialogue with Woolf's seminal 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown'. Modernist themes emerge: the unknowability of other people and the consequent isolation and loneliness that sits at the heart of human existence; the rich yet divisive quality of the human imagination that enables institutionalised closeness as in marriage yet which also separates as each partner lives their own fantasised world as foregrounded in 'Lappin and Lapinova'.

Woolf's prose is luminescent; and these experimental pieces show her pushing the boundaries that she inherited, making transformative interventions into the way the English language and literature more broadly may be conceived of and used. There's a restless, searching intelligence behind these pieces, as well as something both more playful and productive.

[Flybyreader · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honor them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases…”

Here I am, feeling heavy in my seat, feeling gravity more than ever, thoughts jumbled up inside. Woolf has a unique way of doing that I notice and I have to admit I love her non-fiction and short fiction more than her most famous novels. This collection includes several very popular short stories of Woolf including the Haunted House, Monday and Tuesday and The Lady in the Looking-Glass. This version includes a very comprehensive introduction and I enjoyed reading it as much as the stories, it provided a better understanding of the author. Some of the stories did not make much sense to me until I made a research and read analysis of the stories but overall I enjoyed it and found each one rich and thought-provoking.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Snapped this up after seeing "A Ghost Story," and while I wasn't keen on the caricature pieces toward the end, "A Haunted House" (featured briefly), "The Mark on the Wall" and "Solid Objects" gave me an even stronger appreciation for the film. Keep thinking of Gogol's "Old World Landowners" and love as a series of mutually-formed habits. 'Safe, safe, safe...'
As I'm learning from personal experience, haunting is habit, too.

[Virga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didžiulis malonumas skaityti kiekvieną pastraipą ir kiekvieną puslapį. Gražiausia yra tie ironiški, bet šilti žmonių portretai - lyg kiekvieną aprašomą žmogų rašytoja asmeniškai mylėtų. Niekas nevyksta, jokie siužetai nesiplėtoja (nebent visai visai minimalūs), bet užtenka tų žmonių, jų namų ir jų kompanijų.

[melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

-A Haunted House: 3/5
-A Society: 5/5 (My favourite!! Just a bunch of a girls sat around trying to figure out if men have achieved anything, what men have been doing all this time and whether they should continue to birth them - peak feminism.)
‘’Why she asked ‘if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?’’
-Monday or Tuesday: 3/5
-An Unwritten Novel: 2.5/5
‘Life’s what you see in people’s eyes; life’s what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though any seek to hide it, cease to be aware of - what? That life’s like that, it seems.’
-The String Quarter: 4/5
-Kew Gardens: 3/5
-The Mark On The Wall: 4/5
Once again showing us how even an unnoticed mark on your wall and the fear of missing out can lead you to have an existential crisis…cheers Virginia.
-Solid Objects: 3.5/5
-In The Orchard: 3/5
-A Woman’s College From Outside: 4/5
-The Shooting Party: 5/5
Just like a Smosh Gentlemen’s Club sketch.
-The Duchess And The Jeweller: 2/5
-Lappin and Lappinova: 5/5
‘’Yes,’ he said at length. ‘Poor Lapinova…’ he straightened his tie at the looking-glass. ‘Caught in a trap’ he said, ‘killed’ and sat down and read the newspaper.
So that was the end of that marriage.’

[JANE · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked ‘The Haunted House’ best, but also ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ and ‘The Mark on the Wall’

[Dominika Žáková · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vždy mám pocit nehodnosti, keď mám napísať recenziu Woolfovej. Jej poviedky sú často skôr prekrásne básne v próze (Blue and Green) a občas ma až zarazia hravosťou a smútkovtipom (Lappin and Lapinova). The Mark on the Wall pre mňa navždy ostane poviedkou, ktorou som pre seba ešte kedysi na strednej objavila úplne “inú” literatúru.

Z mojich ceruzkou načmáraných marginálií tak vyberám len útržky dojmov:
-metafikcia
-zmyslovosť s dôrazom na citlivý zrak
-sofistikovaný vtip a hravosť
-mozaika esencie života
-hlas vecí a prírody
-dôležitosť každého objektu a momentu bytia objatého slovami

[Kyriakos Sorokkou]

UPDATES IN BOLD

In the last week of July 2015 I was reaching the end of my Virginia Woolf Marathon, reading the last 3 books simultaneously. By the end I was ill with Virginiasis nervosa. . .
This collection included stories mainly from the Monday or Tuesday collection of short stories; and a few other stories she publish in magazines, including Harper's Bazaar (Yes, Virginia Woolf was sending stories to Harper's Bazaar), along with with four full-page woodcuts by Vanessa Bell (her sister).
Many of the stories were not actually stories (in the conventional way), but reflections of an observer on a train, thoughts, descriptions of lamps and pot plants in dimly lit rooms. Plot is not what you are going to expect from these stories.
Not my cup of tea, although some stories where intriguing (if you can call these clusters of words stories).
2.6 stars

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

'A Society' remains the funniest short story ever written, in my opinion, and 'Lappin and Lapinova' might be the sweetest. The first is an iconic antipatriarchal retort to a misogynistic piece by Arnold Bennett, and the second a moving meditation on the fantasy-world that lovers can live in together, and what it means to leave.

Those are the definite highlights for me in the selection. The Notes are a little outdated in this edition but the Introduction is fairly sound.

"they possessed a private world, inhabited, save for the one white hare, entirely by rabbits. No one guessed that there was such a place"

"did the Oxbridge professors help to produce good people and good books?–the objects of life...It never struck me to ask. It never occurred to me that they could possibly produce anything."

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creio que não foi a melhor altura para me dedicar a estes contos. É um livro que merece mais dedicação e atenção por parte do leitor do que a que eu tinha disponível, o que acabou por prejudicar a minha apreciação.
O melhor conto ficou para o fim - e é mesmo o último.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

favorites:
a haunted house
kew gardens
the mark on the wall
the lady in the looking glass: a reflection
lappin and lapinova

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Virginia Woolf understands life better than any human being. The precision of her words and her language captures the scope of the world: from the snail in "Kew Gardens" to Miranda in a space as big as the eye of a needle in "In the Orchard."

"A Society" was enthralling and provocative.

"The Mark on the Wall" reminded me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." I enjoyed the way Woolf brought back the snail.

My favorite story, by far, is "Solid Objects." I also loved "The Duchess and the Jeweller."

"The Shooting Party" reminded me of "An Unwritten Novel," but far eerier.

"Lappin and Lappinova" felt strange to me- the way Rosalind used her fantasy world as a coping mechanism was frightening and frustrating all at once.

Favorite quotes:

"We will find out what the world is like." [A Society]

"Oh, how it whirls and surges - floats me afresh!" [An Unwritten Novel"]

"The contrast between the china so vivid and alert, and the glass so mute and contemplative, fascinated him, and wondering and amazed he asked himself how the two came to exist in the same world." [Solid Objects]

"Something murmuring in the distance, the world of course." [A Woman's College From Outside]

"She was one of those reticent people whose minds hold their thoughts enmeshed in clouds of silence - she was filled with thoughts." [The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection]

"It cut the string that held the rain." [The Shooting Party]

"One after another, lamps stood up; held their yellow heads erect for a second; then were felled." [The Shooting Party]

"And again he dismantled himself and became once more the little boy playing marbles in the alley where they sell stolen dogs on Sunday." [The Duchess and the Jeweller]

"She felt that her icicle was being turned into water. She was being melted; dispersed; dissolved into nothingness." [Lappin and Lapinova]

[Veerle · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite little book, even though I wasn’t into all of the stories. Because the one’s I did enjoy I fell utterly and completely in love with. Amazing concepts and beautiful writing. You shape quite a world ms Woolf <3

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5 stars*

I love Woolf's writing and her ideas, but I really do find her fiction impenetrable. I will continue to try with it though.

[Kirsty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly splendid. Woolf is a master of the short story craft; she creates delicious and startling slices of life, and presents them in beautiful and original ways.

[Merry · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed (and sometimes very experimental) bag but an enjoyable and fascinating reading experience.

[nellig anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

It made me reconsider my ability to understand English

[Zara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️

Virginia Woolf is comparable to olives. After a long while of not eating olives I can’t completely remember what they tasted like and I am convinced that I will love them this time. I eat one again and I exclaim ‘Ah! I remember now, I don’t like olives’. Despite this, I eat more because I know they’re good for me and many other people like them, until I can’t take it anymore and I stop. Then, the cycle stars again.

I had planned to end my review here, but I wanted to elaborate a little more. I realised that my experience with Woolf’s work is better explained by periods of monotony and confusion surrounding random, absolutely brilliant, fleeting moments of ‘Omg! I finally understand! This is a masterpiece!’ So maybe this was the writer’s intention, but I’m so confused. I’ll have to wait until I try another olive again.

(My favourite stories/olives were Kew Gardens and The Lady in the Looking Glass. They highlight Woolf’s best literary features while not being too overwhelming or tedious.)

[Waldo · Rating 4 out of 5]

ცოტა უცნაურია, მაგრამ წინასიტყვაობა, სადაც ვირჯინიას ჩანაწერებიდან და წერილებიდან იყო ამონარიდები, ბევრად უფრო დასამახსოვრებელი იყო ჩემთვის. თუნდაც ეს:

"Please if ever i come again, don't meet me... but let me find you among your things - you can't think what a shock of emotion it gives me - seeing people among their things - I've lots such scenes in my head; the whole of life presented - the other persons life - for 10 seconds; and then it goes; and comes again; so next time don't meet me."

თუმცა, მოთხრობებიც ძალიან საინტერესოა. განსაკუთრებით - An unwritren novel.

"Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, heaving learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of."

[Sanika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a while, but here I am on the other side.

This has been my introduction to Virginia Woolf's work, and it's been grand.

The stories aren't what you'd call stories, not all of them. They are rich, vivid descriptions of what could be considered ordinary. She describes thoughts and feelings more intensely than I think and feel them, so that even a mark on a wall becomes something alive, something to be pondered over.

Her writings make it seem like she was almost too aware of human nature and the meaninglessness of it all. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. It made me feel.

[Helena Van der Auwera · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5
Ik raakte er nogal moeizaam door :( Wel prachtig geschreven maar ben duidelijk nog niet helemaal thuis in het modernisme, haar short stories zijn vaak iets moeilijker en meer modernistisch dan novels zoals Orlando. The Society en Blue and Green waren mijn favorieten. Wel prachtige uitgave met de originele etsen van Bell uit de bundel Monday or Tuesday van de Hogarth Press!! :) (De notes hielpen wel om alles beter te begrijpen en boden een achtergrond bij elke short story, hierdoor duurde het lezen natuurlijk wel wat langer)

[Inês · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good selection. The introduction and the notes were also wonderful. My favourites were: A Society, Kew Gardens, The Mark on the Wall, A Woman's College from Outside, and The Lady in the Looking-glass: A Reflection.

[lochie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite fun, would have been better consumed over a longer period of time since it’s quite dense.

[ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

i didn’t like all the stories in here but the ones i did like i LOVED

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a few favourites from this collection, but ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ wrung out my heart and hung it to dry in the warm summer air.