Selected Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) [Paperback]

Those short writings are not only a stepstone in modern literature history, they are a manifest.

For the first time the purely sensual sensitivity of an intellectual woman is not only the form but also the real underlying subject of her writing, of which the apparent, tangible subjects become only secondary. Yet there is always an harmonious blend between subject and form. Virginia Woolf wants to stand for female sensitivity: to succeed in making the reader (even male readers) feel how apparently unimportant things can become the most important things to a particular individual. It constantly wanders on the borderline between musing and tangibility. Her language is still beautiful, fresh and vivid. (Even non-English readers should read it in English if possible.) Such style has inspired many writers ever since, but reading this one book is going back to the roots, and realizing than even though she's inspired hundreds, she remains one utter master of the genre.

The main problem with books of Selected material is that the criterion for the choice of stories/poems often appears to be random and is at best left unexplained. This is the case of this selection of short stories by Virginia Woolf. Nevertheless, the careful editor (whose valuable notes at the end of the book somehow compensate for this) does suggest something which becomes clear from detained surveyance of the stories: all of those which were published within Monday or Tuesday in 1921 seem to be related in the theme of the end of the Great War.

"A Haunted House" is inspired by the house in which the Woolfs spent weekends and holidays before and during the War. It is mostly a sentimental account of a writer's relationship with her dwelling: "What did I come in here for"?, "What did I want to find?"

"A Society" is perhaps the story in the collection most directly concerned with the War. The shock of the outbreak of the War is reflected in the women's society's pursuit of enquiry into the world of men. The symbolic importance of the War is played down in the women's flippant project and their final optimistic decision to believe in the value and persistence of female intuitiveness and continue to hope for the future. Nevertheless, deeper questions are addressed here, such as the issue of the actual relationship between the militaristic elements of our democratic societies and the artistic and cultural elites (it seems to be implied that they go together, and the mission of the women in this little story is to discover the meaning of this mysterious alliance). By turning inwards, the woman-as-authors finds a source of strength, moral and aesthetic, and somehow detached from or indifferent to those worldly (and manly) bellicose pursuits. We must remember that Virginia Woolf was, above all things, an elitist, and this results in her ability to hold herself outside and above world affairs with such grace as this.

"Monday or Tuesday", which gives its meaning to the book of tales, is another little sketch on the writing craft, or of writing in the midst of other things: natural, mechanical, spiritual... all these elements both threaten and inspire the author's imagination.

"An Unwritten Novel" is another exploration of the meanings of life and literature. Literature is seen as a divergent way of approaching the reading of life - as opposed to newspapers' accounts - but yet in deep, though still fully unaccountable agreement with the mechanics of life and history. The whole of reality is seen to be life's text, to be read and interpreted by the inspired author, though with a threat to his/her sanity. The optimist about the continuity of life after the Great War is asserted despite the psychic and moral threat that it supposed to Western Civilization; the survival of the life of the imagination is the best testimony that there are grounds for hope, and if offers spiritual comfort to the author.

"The String Quartet" is an original exposition of the bittersweet persistence of superficial, glitzy enjoyments (a concert at Regent Street) in a world barely recovered from the recent violent conflict: ""If indeed it's true, as they're saying, that Regent Street is up, and the Treaty signed..." Woolf never ceases to wonder at the manic contrapositions between war news and entertainment news and news on illness or housing prices and weather news, etc all in the same report. As a character explains towards the end, it is "Mad! Mad! Mad!" When mixing up with the frivolities of the wider world, the characters seem to lose that sense of repose and surety that made the Conflict at least bearable from the perspective of retired, studious life.

"Blue and Green" is a little experimental piece which according to S. P. Rosenbaum in English Literature and British Philosophy (1971) is an exercise in the rendering of consciousness which is related to the philosopher G. E. Moore's essay "The Refutation of Idealism" (1903).

"Kew Gardens" was included in Monday or Tuesday but had been originally published by the Hogarth Press in 1919. The Woolfs had moved to Richmond in 1914, and the Royal Botanic Gardens soon became a favourite walk. The story is a contraposition of the human and natural worlds in which the mixing of the two results in the highlighting of human aimlessness and the conscientousness of nature. In other words, the richness and variety of nature, even of nature within the midst of a noisy, mechanised city, is not too dissimilar from the mysterious purposefulness of human destinies.

"The Mark on the Wall" dwells on the theme of the artist craft, on the ritual of writing and the difficulty to find concentration, to discover the threads from which a fiction may be pulled through. It is also a very important story because it constitutes a full account of the heralding of a new way of writing, of the twentieth-century style of writing: "Suppose the looking-glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure ... is there no longer". This way Woolf explains her own formal experiments with the novel, the disappearance of both metaphor and description to give way to "reflection" and a defamiliarisation of the real, or its appropriation for artistic purposes. "And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps..."

"Solid Objects" is the first of the stories in this selection that did not appear in Monday or Tuesday, and this is apparent in its clear thematic divergence. The story is a penetrating warning on the dangers of a solipsistic abstraction from politics and life. Through the story of a mind haunted by the riddle of the accidental in life, we are shown how the artistic world of forms may lead to unfertile alienation, despite the apparent intellectual rewards, if one's motivation is an obsessive sense of philosophical ambition which puts us at odds with our everyday life. The man in this story is preoccupied by the inexplicable curiosity of form - his own form, ultimately, and his sense of purpose in life end up being crushed under the extensive system of inquiry that he develops.

"In the Orchard" consists of a three-perspective narration of a story with virtually no plot but plenty of impressionistic detailling.

"A Woman's College from Outside" tells of a young woman (nineteen years old) at college in Cambridge who experiences the beauty of the world in a sensual night whose odours mix with her ideal memories of Bamborough Castle. If nothing, it could be considered as an ellaborate, delicately woven parody of the author's own narcissistic erotism and elitism.

"The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection" dwells on the nature of our own selves as constituting a reflection of the things that we surround ourselves with in our lives. Our objects and possessions may be more or less imbued with meaning depending of our own capacity to hold love inside.

"The Shooting Party" is another crafty parody, this time of country house life.

"The Duchess and the Jeweller" deals with the theme of the real or genuine versus the counterfeit. The jeweller, himself a counterfeit in upper class society, has not the moral right to question the value of the jewells that the duchess pretends to sell to him at a very high price.

Finally, "Lappin and Lappinova" is about the breakdown of a marriage, or male easy disaffection with the childish feminine imagination which despite its apparent unimportance might have held the marriage together.

The selection leaves us with a sense of unanswered questions, since the stories's themes glide from the big issues in the early ponderations on the shock of World War I to the denial of the previous celebration of the imagination in "Solid Objects" and then the flippant little parodies that appear towards the end. The "Introduction" by the editor tries to redress this lack of balance by reminding us of the creative craft in The Waves, a sure proof of the persistence of the author's belief in art over time.

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