7 best short stories by Virginia Woolf

By Virginia Woolf and August Nemo

The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Woolf ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the middle part of the twentieth century. Her novels can perhaps best be described as impressionistic, a literary style which attempts to inspire impressions rather than recreating reality.This selection specially chosen by the literary critic August Nemo, contains the following stories:A Haunted HouseKew GardensAn Unwritten NovelSolid ObjectsThe Mark on the WallMrs. Dalloway in the Bond StreetThe Lady in the Looking Glass

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tacet Books
• Release date: May 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9783968588100

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King’s College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father’s death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London’s West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf’s work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.

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The Author

Virginia Woolf was an English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic, considered as one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, a renowned beauty. According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. This place inspired her to write one of her masterpieces,  To the Lighthouse .

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. but it was the death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Some scholars have suggested that her mental instability was also due to the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth.

Woolf came to know the founders of the the Bloomsbury Group. She became an active member of this literary circle. Later, Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a penniless Jew) the couple shared a close bond.

Virginia's 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. In some of her novels she moves away from the use of plot and structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasise the psychological aspects of her characters.

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

A Haunted House

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.

Here we left it, she said. And he added, Oh, but here tool It's upstairs, she murmured. And in the garden, he whispered. Quietly, they said, or we shall wake them.

But it wasn't that you woke us. Oh, no. They're looking for it; they're drawing the curtain, one might say, and so read on a page or two. Now they've found it,' one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. What did I come in here for? What did I want to find? My hands were empty. Perhaps its upstairs then?" The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.

But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. Safe, safe, safe the pulse of the house beat softly. The treasure buried; the room . . . the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?

A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burned behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us, coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. Safe, safe, safe, the pulse of the house beat gladly. 'The Treasure yours."

The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.

Here we slept, she says. And he adds, Kisses without number. Waking in the morning— Silver between the trees— Upstairs— 'In the garden— When summer came— 'In winter snowtime— "The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of