A Study Guide for Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535826815

Book preview

1

Kew Gardens

Virginia Woolf

1919

Introduction

The story was published on May 12, 1919, by Hogarth Press, a publishing enterprise cofounded by Woolf and her husband Leonard in 1917. For the first edition, Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell fashioned two woodcut illustrations to accompany the text. When the third edition was printed in 1927, Bell’s illustrations appeared on each page throughout the text.

The story was also reprinted in Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday(1921) and in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories(1944), edited by Leonard Woolf. In the past decades it has been anthologized many times, representing a slice of Woolf’s artistic mastery and reflection of her keen insight into what it means to be human.

Author Biography

Virginia Woolf is one of the most admired authors of the twentieth century. She was born on January 25, 1882, to Julie and Leslie Stephens in London, England. Sir Leslie Stephens was a very influential writer and critic who sternly and methodically published volume after volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, of which he was the first editor. Growing up, Woolf met many famous writers including George Meredith and Henry