Selected short stories, p.1
Selected Short Stories, page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
Selected Short Stories
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob’s Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women’s experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I – V, selections from her essays and short stories and Flush (1933), a reconstruction of the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel.
Sandra Kemp is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Westminster. She writes on fiction, cultural history and literary theory. She reviews literary criticism, children’s books and dance for a variety of publications. Her publications include Kipling’s Hidden Narratives, Italian Feminist Thought, Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion and Feminisms: An Oxford Reader. She has also edited works by Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, Virginia Woolf and Henry James. She is currently writing a book on portraiture.
Julia Briggs is General Editor for the works of Virginia Woolf in Penguin.
SELECTED SHORT STORIES
VIRGINIA WOOLF
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY SANDRA KEMP
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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This selection first published in Penguin Books 1993
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000
9
Selection and editorial matter copyright © Sandra Kemp, 1993
The moral right of the editor has been asserted.
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
eISBN: 978–0–14–191221–9
CONTENTS
Bibliographical Note
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
A Haunted House
A Society
Monday or Tuesday
An Unwritten Novel
The String Quartet
Blue and Green
Kew Gardens
The Mark on the Wall
Solid Objects
In the Orchard
A Woman’s College from Outside
The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection
The Shooting Party
The Duchess and the Jeweller
Lappin and Lapinova
Notes
Bibliographical Note
The following is a list of abbreviated titles used in this edition.
Diary: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).
Letters: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).
Essays: The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).
CE: Collected Essays, 4 vols., ed. Leonard Woolf (Chatto & Windus, 1966, 1967).
Moments of Being: Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Hogarth Press, 1985).
Introduction
… the being grows rings; identity becomes robust. What was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose – so it seems.1
Thus Bernard, Woolf’s surrogate writing self, in The Waves. The fragments, sketches and longer pieces that comprise Woolf’s shorter fiction have a freedom from convention that the early novels (‘flung with a purpose’) yearned for, but dared not achieve. By contrast, the stories are ‘all so casual, all so haphazard’, as the narrator of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ remarks:
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! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard… (p. 54)
Woolf’s shorter fiction is written against the traditional grain. It has, in her own words, more ‘rhythm’ than ‘narrative’. She explained to Ethel Smyth, ‘though the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for some rope to throw to the reader’.2 Yet despite its difficulties, she could not resist ‘the flying phrase’, and she urged her sister Vanessa to follow her example: ‘I should like you to paint a large, large, picture; where everything would be brought perfectly firmly together, yet all half flying off the canvas in rapture.’3 And Vanessa’s woodcuts, which accompany the first edition of Monday or Tuesday, published in 1921 (and are included in this edition), are a mirror image of the stories. An anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement complained:
… the inking is often faulty; and Mrs Bell’s delightful woodcuts (the one with the fiddles is peculiarly exciting and suggestive) have left ghosts of themselves on the pages opposite; and also they show through the paper, so that the backs are difficult to read.4
In the stories themselves, any difficulty lies in an odd combination of privacy and pace; the verve and swerve of the style inseparable from Woolf’s daring experimentation with interior monologue, and her attempts, as she put it in another context, to be ‘released from the cramp and confinement of personality’.5 Another paradigm for this new narrative voice, free from conventional stylistic ties and constraints, would be the narrator’s observation about Minnie in ‘An Unwritten Novel’:
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? – the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world – a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down dark corridors. (p. 34)
Woolf also expressed admiration for the Russian novelists, and shared with them a sense that chaotic or incoherent experience should be included in fiction. And Woolf used the stories to introduce perceptions that didn’t obviously lead anywhere, or become part of a larger unit. For example, ‘A Woman’s College From Outside’ springs out of the novel, Jacob’s Room. But Woolf recognized that it didn’t finally belong there – it moves out of the novel rather than back into it again.
Retrospectively, however, and perhaps with a degree of professional after-thought, Woolf described the process of the composition of the stories with more restraint in another letter to Ethyl Smyth:
These little pieces in Monday or (and) Tuesday were written by way of diversion; they were the treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style. I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall – all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. The Unwritten Novel was the great discovery, however. That – again in one second – showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it – not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room, Mrs Dalloway etc – How I trembled with excitement; and then Leonard came in, and I drank my milk, and concealed my excitement, and wrote I suppose another page of that interminable Night and Day (which some say is my best book). All this I will tell you one day – here I suppress my natural inclination to say, if dear Ethel you have the least wish to hear any more on a subject that can’t be of the least interest to you. And, I add, Green and Blue and the heron were the wild outbursts of freedom, inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable mere outcries.6
‘Wild outbursts of freedom’ the stories may be, but the environment of Monday or Tuesday, and of the other short fiction, is also at once urban and banal: ‘Regent Street… the Treaty… the weather not cold for the time of year, and even at that rent not a flat to be had, and the worst of influenza and its after effects’ (p. 39). Woolf shared T. S. Eliot’s wish to present the boredom, the horror and the reality of the everyday world rather than to construct a fictional one. ‘The kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose’ (p. 47) represents the limits of romance. And nothing happens in the stories. They are rarely ‘about’ anything in the conventional sense. As E. M. Forster remarked in a contemporary review of ‘Kew Gardens’: ‘She only says, “Oh, here is something that I have seen,” and then strays forward.’7
In a letter to George Rylands in 1934, Woolf notes that novelists from George Eliot onwards had ‘lost the sense of an audience’, whereas the great Victorians had displayed a sense of ‘abandonment, richness, surprise, as well as a redundancy, tediousness and superficiality’.8 In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Woolf herself defines such inclusiveness as part of the pleasure of ‘rubbish reading’:
Is there not an open window on the right hand of the bookcase? How delightful to stop reading and look out! How stimulating the scene is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement… The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys.9
In Woolf’s view, such ‘irrelevance’ and ‘perpetual movement’ prompts a mode of response that acknowledges community between reader and writer, life and art, between ‘our rush of undiscriminating emotion’ and ‘the swarm and confusion of life’; that attempts to capture the present moment; and that acknowledges and respects the enigma of other people: ‘because one will never see them again, never know what happened next… as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train’ (pp. 53–4).
Elsewhere, Woolf calls this her ‘little language’ which echoes the old and humble ‘common voice singing out of doors’.10 Here, as Woolf explains in her essay on ‘Craftsmanship’, language is at its most democratic:
Undoubtedly [words] like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light… That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty.11
The ‘little language’ reflects a moving exchange between the personal and the impersonal, the inevitability of death, and the possibility for repeated modest human triumphs before death. ‘I begin to long,’ Bernard says in The Waves, ‘for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement’:
What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and picking up some scrap of bright wool, a feather or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry… Nothing neat.12
There is nothing ‘neat’ about the stories. Reviewing ‘Kew Gardens’ in 1919, E. M. Forster admired their ‘yawn and… gape’:
For in this queer world of Vision it is the surfaces of things, not their names or natures that matter; it has no connection with the worlds of practical or philosophic truth… It aims… at long loose sentences that sway and meander.13
But, for the most part, Forster’s enthusiasm was only cautiously echoed by contemporary reviewers who showed themselves more comfortable with ‘ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life’. In the New Statesman the ‘Affable Hawk’ proved tolerably affable:
It is these iridescent, quickly-pricked, quickly-blown-again bubbles, made of private thoughts and dreams, which the author is an adept at describing… Auras, in the sense of temporary and shifting integuments of dreams and thoughts we all carry about with us while pursuing practical aims, are her subject matter… The contrast between the diversity and arbitrariness of the inner life and the uniformity and conventionality of the life without fills her alternately with laughter and amazement.14
Unsigned reviews in the Dial and The Times Literary Supplement however, were more guarded:
The most alluring feature here is to be found in the exciting knack she has mastered of starting anywhere and arriving anywhere. But when form is vague, one has a right to ask for more frequent minor illuminations, whereas these stories too often give the effect of William Carlos Williams’s Improvisations with the sudden flashes left out.15
We complain of Monday or Tuesday, not that it means too little that is intelligible to the plain mind, but that it cannot help meaning too much for its purpose. Prose may ‘aspire to the condition of music’; it cannot reach it.16
Today, critical opinion has not substantially changed. Woolf is still best known for her novels, and for her essays and polemics, especially A Room of One’s Own. As she herself predicted, the stories remain ‘mere tangles of words’.17 Only the handful of stories collected by Leonard Woolf in The Haunted House are at all familiar. Of these, ‘The New Dress’ is a regular anthology piece, and ‘Solid Objects’ and the ‘Mrs Dalloway’ stories are also more widely known.
‘More arty than her novels’, the stories are, however, more than merely a diversion in style. Nor are they as ‘difficult’ or inaccessible as their critical reception would suggest. The stories are experimental, reflecting Woolf’s most urgent preoccupations and the metafictional processes of her art. But they are also fun – sharp, witty, of the moment – yet memorable. Writing in her diary in 1927, Woolf noted: ‘How many little stories come into my head! For instance: Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies. One might write a book of short significant scenes. She did not open her letters.’18 Such evanescent moments – the compression of life finely into its most intense instants – determine the character, and especially the structure of the stories. They reveal what remains when ‘the crumpled skin of the day [has been] cast… into the hedge’.19 Life is like an artist’s sketch book, or snap-shots in a photo album, each moment flickers towards another. In Monday or Tuesday, and the later stories, the writer’s mind is always alert. The characteristic ‘momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement’ is beautifully conveyed in the opening sequence of the ‘little letter story’ which became ‘The Lady in the Looking-Glass’. Here the artist’s eye combines the visual and the verbal:
The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling – things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking… And there were obscure flushes and darkenings too, as if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple; and the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a human being. Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together. (p. 75)
