Virginia Woolf wrote short stories throughout her life, often to provide relief from some weightier literary task. The tales appeared sporadically, in magazines such as ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ and ‘The Athenaeum’. Although she intended to publish a collected edition of her stories, this did not happen in her lifetime, and it was not until three years after her death in 1941 that her husband Leonard brought out a volume entitled ‘A Haunted House and Other Short Stories’. Even then, this was not the collected stories, but a selection.
Woolf’s short stories are indeed often short - ‘A Haunted House’ is only 688 words - and often highly experimental in their use of language. Some, like ‘Lappin and Lapinova’, are modernist fables; others are satirical parodies of the stifling, misogynistic English society of the inter-war years; yet others display a meditative, poetic quality, perhaps best described in Woolf’s own phrase (and story title), ‘Moments of Being’. Several stories, such as ‘Solid Objects’, depict obsession and the descent into madness, foreshadowing the author’s own tragic suicide by drowning.
This Kindle edition contains the eighteen stories in the 1944 posthumous volume, plus five others.
The text has been edited from multiple sources, and carefully formatted with an active Table of Contents and section marks for easy browsing.
A Haunted House - Monday or Tuesday - An Unwritten Novel - The String Quartet - Kew Gardens - The Mark on the Wall - The New Dress - The Shooting Party - Lappin and Lapinova - Solid Objects - The Lady in the Looking-Glass - The Duchess and the Jeweller - Moments of Being - The Man Who Loved His Kind - The Searchlight - The Legacy - Together and Apart - A Summing Up - A Society - Blue and Green - In the Orchard - Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street - A Woman’s College from Outside.
Woolf’s short stories are indeed often short - ‘A Haunted House’ is only 688 words - and often highly experimental in their use of language. Some, like ‘Lappin and Lapinova’, are modernist fables; others are satirical parodies of the stifling, misogynistic English society of the inter-war years; yet others display a meditative, poetic quality, perhaps best described in Woolf’s own phrase (and story title), ‘Moments of Being’. Several stories, such as ‘Solid Objects’, depict obsession and the descent into madness, foreshadowing the author’s own tragic suicide by drowning.
This Kindle edition contains the eighteen stories in the 1944 posthumous volume, plus five others.
The text has been edited from multiple sources, and carefully formatted with an active Table of Contents and section marks for easy browsing.
A Haunted House - Monday or Tuesday - An Unwritten Novel - The String Quartet - Kew Gardens - The Mark on the Wall - The New Dress - The Shooting Party - Lappin and Lapinova - Solid Objects - The Lady in the Looking-Glass - The Duchess and the Jeweller - Moments of Being - The Man Who Loved His Kind - The Searchlight - The Legacy - Together and Apart - A Summing Up - A Society - Blue and Green - In the Orchard - Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street - A Woman’s College from Outside.
