სახლი მოჩვენებებით

by Virginia Woolf

ცნობილი ინგლისელი მწერალი, ესეისტი და კრიტიკოსი ვირჯინია ვულფი მე-20 საუკუნის ევროპული მოდერნისტული ლიტერატურის მნიშვნელოვანი წარმომადგენელია. მისი ყველაზე ცნობილი ნაწარმოებებია: „მისის დელოუეი“ (1925), „შუქურა“ (1927), „ორლანდო“ (1929), „საკუთარი ოთახი“ (1929). მწერლის პირველი ტექსტი 1915 წელს დაიბეჭდა, პირველი (და მის სიცოცხლეში ერთადერთი) მოთხრობების კრებული კი 1921 წელს გამოიცა. ეს წიგნი შედგენილია მწერლის გარდაცვალების შემდეგ გამოსული მოთხრობების კრებულის მიხედვით, რომელიც ვირჯინია ვულფის მეუღლემ შეადგინა და მასში ავტორის საყვარელი ნაწარმოებები შეიტანა.

Genres: Short Stories, Classics, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, British Literature, Ebooks

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her 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."

Reviews

[Jsiva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't expect any less from Virginia Woolf. Her ideas and experimentation go beyond what I have ever seen from any one author. I love her descriptions of nature and marvel at how well she captures the process of thought and what we think and what we presume...our tumultuous inner self and the guarded outward face that we show.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years—” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—” Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”~The Haunted House

"Come, dream with me," beckons Virginia Woolf in this collection of eighteen stories, some previously published, some unfinished and offered up posthumously by her husband, Leonard.

This is the sensation I had while reading—dreaming scenes that seemed perfectly normal at first, but which were beset by a surreality, a super-reality shimmering just beneath the surface, signaling not all is as it seems.

"Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours.”~Monday or Tuesday

This "worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours" is the theme at the heart of this collection. Woolf takes the impersonal world like a glass ball in her hands and cracks it open ever so slightly, revealing the chaos within.

In Kew Gardens, surely one of the finest in the collection, she juxtaposes the order of natural world with the disorder of human emotion.

Woolf shows in the tense and eerie The Mark on the Wall what the most minute shift of the kaleidoscope of our perspective can do to shape our chose reality.

A New Dress is an exercise in acute self-consciousness, a woman realizing, or imagining she knows, how she appears to others. It is a cruel and perceptive knife thrust at classism.

“She was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.”

Her skewering of Britain's gentry continues in the parodic The Shooting Party, which has a scene I had to read several times to make certain I understood what was happening. Why yes, the Squire does lash his whip about, causing Miss Rashleigh to fall into the fireplace, toppling the shield of the Rashleighs and a picture of King Edward. It's a laugh-out-loud moment of horror.

We talk about powerful opening lines in novel and short stories, but this. This may be one of my favorite closing lines, ever: "So that was the end of that marriage."~Lappin and Lapinova A devastating story of the fickle nature of . . . what? Love? Was there ever love here?

But speaking of opening lines, this one, belonging to The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection is sublime: “People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.” It is also a perceptive and tragic story. One that will have you avoiding mirrors. For how can you trust what you see within? Is your reflection reality or a mistaken image of your own creation?

The Dalloways, particularly, Clarissa, make frequent appearances in this collection, as if Woolf had crafted small sketches, playing with her characters, trying to sort them out. I've not yet read Mrs. Dalloway, so perhaps the integration of these stories and the novel will become clear to me once I've put them all together.

Of all things, nothing is so strange as human intercourse, she thought, because of its changes, its extraordinary irrationality, her dislike being now nothing short of the most intense and rapturous love, but directly the word love occurred to her, she rejected it, thinking again how obscure the mind was, with its very few words for all these astonishing perceptions, these alternations of pain and pleasure. For how did one name this. That is what she felt now, the withdrawal of human affection, Serle’s disappearance, and the instant need they were both under to cover up what was so desolating and degrading to human nature that everyone tried to bury it decently from sight... ~Together and Apart

From the voice of a character, yet one feels the author keening to uncover what society, the society of her time, wants to desperately to hide: the vulnerability of human emotion, the insistence on "worshiping the impersonal world" instead of acknowledging the very personal within and without ourselves.

A beautiful, raw, vulnerable collection of stories, rendered in language both intimate and abstract. I remain in awe of Woolf's ability to transcend the limits of the word and create something divine.

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel a little guilty not enjoying this book more. Woolf was creative and very new with story handling and language. For me, her stories are overly “exquisite” a word she uses at least a couple times in these stories relating to a character’s clothing or things “ascending in exquisite spirals into the air…. .”

These stories often have terrific ideas but seem like they might be intended for her and her “exquisite” friends. Some of her stories were amusing and easy to follow, but not all of them. She can be snobbish about middle and lower class people. She even has less than flattering comments about Jews (not unusual for her time) even though her husband Leonard was of Jewish descent. Speaking of Leonard, he collected and published these after her death. Did she really intend that to happen?

[Lesle · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Haunted House is one of Virginia Woolf's short story collections and I thought would be a good read for the end of October.
The house is described as hearing noises of, maybe it is a couple (ghosts?), going from one room to another.

These conversations are happening between a couple that obviously lived there before.
The chatter between them is about looking for something they dearly need to find and was left behind, but where? Do they find it? Can the current occupant help find it? What is it they so despartely seek?

I loved this tale from Woolf! A friend on Goodreads said Woolf makes her feel included in her stories, that you are right there! which for me is a real talent of hers that I totally agree with.

[Mark André · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful quick read! Poetic and romantic. A new side of Woolf. (Haunted House, only)
Update: 9/7/24
Discovering this wonderful collection of stories has much advanced my opinion of Woolf’s skill. Though some stories were just average, and number of them very good, there were four that stood out for me as being brilliant: Together and Apart; Moments of Being; The New Dress; and The Legacy. Overall, a delightful, stimulating, heartwarming read! And a must for shortstory fans

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

#WITMonth

E enquanto meditava neste aspecto das criaturas, na paciência que possuem, na sua capacidade de sofrimento, no modo como conseguem consolo por meio de pequenos prazeres tão miseráveis, tão mesquinhos e tão sórdidos, os olhos acabaram por se lhe encher realmente de lágrimas.

Na sua maioria estes contos de Virginia Woolf são excelentes, mas o primeiro e o último, “A Marca na Parede” e “O Vestido Novo”, são perfeitos. Diria que o que une estas oito histórias é a escrita sublime, ainda que mais difusa em “A Casa Assombrada” e “Segunda ou Terça-Feira”, e o alheamento da realidade, tanto consciente como inconscientemente, que se traduz em ilusão ou num profundo sentimento de inadequação.
Naquele que me parece ser o mais famoso conto que escreveu, “A Marca na Parede”, Woolf põe a protagonista a divagar sobre uma mancha que detecta na parede, em sucessivas associações de ideias.

A todo o momento vou construindo uma imagem de mim própria, apaixonadamente furtiva, que não posso adorar directamente, porque se o fizesse, cairia imediatamente em mim e deitaria a mão a um livro num gesto de autodefesa. É curioso, com efeito, como uma pessoa protege a sua própria imagem de toda a idolatria ou de qualquer outro sentimento que a possa tornar ridícula ou demasiado diferente do original para ser verosímil.

Em “O Vestido Novo”, por outro lado, entramos na cabeça de Mabel que, na tentativa de ser arrojada e poupada na escolha de um vestido de festa, se deixa levar pela insegurança perante os outros convidados. É curioso que este conto, juntamente com “Resumo”, decorra no universo das festas de Mrs. Dalloway, que aqui não passa de personagem secundária.

Somos como moscas tentando andar no bordo de um pires de leite, pensou Mabel, e repetiu a frase como se estivesse doente e procurasse uma palavra que aliviasse o seu mal-estar, tornasse suportável aquela agonia. Fragmentos de Shakespeare, linhas de livros que lera havia séculos, subitamente emergiam da sua memória agonizante.


A Marca na Parede – 5*
A Casa Assombrada – 3*
Segunda ou Terça-Feira - 4*
Lappin e Lapinova - 4*
A Duquesa e o Joalheiro - 4*
O Legado – 4*
Resumo – 4*
O Vestido Novo – 5*

[manju ♡]

i don’t gravitate toward short stories but i think it’s about time i read virginia woolf 😔

i. "a haunted house" - 4.5
i’ve read this like four times and it just gets better with every read. a ghostly couple haunts their former home, revisiting the memories and joys of their lives together, seeing in the current residents that same love and warmth. the prose is gorgeous, alive almost.

“safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “long years—“ he sighs. “again you found me.” “here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. here we left our treasure—“ stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. waking, i cry “oh, is this your buried treasure? the light in the heart.”

carve this into my skin thank you.

ii. “monday or tuesday” - 3

a little too abstract for my liking but i do like the idea that truth is colored by perception and does not exist entirely on its own.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearer they come, cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. "Look," he breathes. "Sound asleep. Love upon their lips."



Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" is a lovely story about a ghost couple and a living couple occupying the same dwelling. This is as playful and lighthearted a story as Woolf has ever written.

This is another beautiful piece of writing by my beloved Virginia Woolf.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fucking beautiful and dark it makes my soul ache.

My Favorites:

Solid Objects:
"his eyes lost their intensity, or rather the background of thought and experience which gives an inscrutable depth to the eyes of grown people disappeared, leaving only the clear transparent surface, expressing nothing but wonder, which the eyes of young children display."


Kew Gardens:
"and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue. It seemed as if all gross and heavy bodies had sunk down in the heat motionless and lay huddled upon the ground, but their voices went wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies of candles. Voices. Yes, voices. Wordless voices, breaking the silence suddenly with such depth of contentment, such passion of desire, or, in the voices of children, such freshness of surprise; breaking the silence? But there was no silence; all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air."

[Katya]

Se quiséssemos um termo de comparação para a vida, o melhor seria o de um metropolitano, atravessando o túnel a cinquenta milhas à hora e deixando-nos do outro lado sem um gancho sequer no cabelo! Cuspidos aos pés de Deus, inteiramente nus!

Virginia Woolf foi relevante para a sua (e nossa) época, mas, arrisco dizer, será ainda mais relevante com o passar do tempo, pois o seu olhar não abarcava apenas o que via, queria ir mais longe e, fazendo-o, demarcava-se do palpável, do real e chegava a um estado quase quântico da literatura. Por isso, Woolf não obedecia a regras - estruturalistas, éticas ou outras - e estava simultaneamente aqui e agora, e ali e depois. Sem barreiras, recreava os espaços intelectuais das mulheres (que, forçadas ao exílio do mundo dos homens sempre se criaram universos alternativos), falava para ontem, hoje e amanhã. Woolf criava espaços simultâneos onde se desdobram as múltiplas possibilidades da existência - uma espécie de paradoxo de Schrödinger aplicado à existência da Mulher. E mesmo sem se explanar por centenas de páginas, mesmo sem fazer uso de uma corrente de pensamento (corrente de consciência, fluxo de consciência, como preferirem - corrente de pensamento engloba também uma nova filosofia), a autora revela em três e quatro páginas uma capacidade de análise do subconsciente, do feminismo e das maquinações sociais construtivistas como nenhum outro seu contemporâneo.

(...)o ponto de vista masculino que governa as nossas vidas, que fixa as regras de comportamento,(.)uma velha metade de fantasma(.)que, em breve, espero, será posta no caixote do lixo, que é o fim dos fantasmas, dos armários de mogno(.)dos Deuses e Demónios e o mais que se sabe, deixando-nos por fim uma impressão tóxica de liberdade ilícita - se é que tal coisa existe, a liberdade...

A MARCA NA PAREDE
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
A CASA ASSOMBRADA
⭐⭐⭐
SEGUNDA OU TERÇA FEIRA
⭐⭐⭐
LAPPIN E LAPPINOVA
⭐⭐⭐
A DUQUESA E O JOALHEIRO
⭐⭐⭐⭐
O LEGADO
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
RESUMO
⭐⭐⭐

E como isto vai curtinho, um pequenino aparte: os contos (e a obra) de Woolf dispensavam completamente o posfácio do editor. É certo que vender 80 páginas por 14 ou 15€ é um roubo, e tirar-lhe esta meia dúzia de folhas só o tornava mais sórdido, mas o que acrescentam as palavras generalistas e a dezena e meia de citações (sem fonte) com que Francisco Vale demostra que leu a autora? Não vejo em que medida arrogar esse feito à laia de demonstração gratuita engrandece uma escritora que não precisa de contextos - ou ajuda sequer o leitor mais leigo. Se o senhor editor, em vez de se pôr a dizer o que já todos sabemos, tivesse recuperado o último conto que constava da edição anterior, teria feito melhor figura.

[Mark André · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, cool story. Almost poetry. Maybe showing a softer side of the author!

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

From Leonard Woolf's introduction to this posthumous collection:

Monday or Tuesday, the only book of short stories by Virginia Woolf which appeared in her lifetime, was published 22 years ago, in 1921. It has been out of print for years.

All through her life, Virginia Woolf used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, and she felt in the mood to write one (which was not frequent), she would take a sketch out of her drawer and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times. Or if she felt, as she often did, while writing a novel that she required to rest her mind by working at something else for a time, she would either write a critical essay or work upon one of her sketches for short stories.

For some time before her death we had often discussed the possibility of her republishing Monday or Tuesday, or publishing a new volume of collected short stories. Finally, in 1940, she decided that she would get together a new volume of such stories and include in it most of the stories which had appeared originally in Monday or Tuesday, as well as some published subsequently in magazines and some unpublished. Our idea was that she should produce a volume of critical essays in 1941 and the volume of stories in 1942.

In the present volume I have tried to carry out her intention. I have included in it six out of the eight stories or sketches which originally appeared in Monday or Tuesday. The two omitted by me are “A Society,” and “Blue and Green”; I know that she had decided not to include the first and I am practically certain that she would not have included the second. I have then printed six stories which appeared in magazines between 1922 and 1941; they are: “The New Dress,” “The Shooting Party,” “Lappin and Lapinova,” “Solid Objects,” “The Lady in the Looking-Glass,” and “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” The magazines in which they appeared were: The Forum, Harper’s Bazaar, The Athenæum, Harper’s Monthly Magazine.

Finally I have included six unpublished stories. (It is possible that one of these, “Moments of Being,” was published. My own recollection was that it had been, but there is no record of its publication, and I have printed it from a typescript.) It is with some hesitation that I have included them. None of them, except “Moments of Being” and “The Searchlight,” are finally revised by her, and she would certainly have done a great deal of work on them before she published them. At least four of them are only just in the stage beyond that of her first sketch.

"Moments of Being" had indeed been published, in Forum in January 1928.

I discuss the stories in Monday or Tuesday, and indeed the omission of "A Society" from this collection, in my review of that work: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

And four of the pieces here - "The New Dress", "Together and Apart", "The Man who Loved his Kind" and "A Summing Up" - all link to the novel Mrs. Dalloway and were included in the later collection Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence (not one assembled with Leonard's input), and I have discussed those in my review of that collection here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

That leaves as previously unreviewed stories here for me to consider:

6 previously published works:
"Solid Objects" (1920), "Moments of Being" (1928), "The Lady in the Looking Glass" (1929), "The Duchess and the Jeweller" (1938), "The Shooting Party" (1938), "Lappin and Lappinova" (1939)

and 1 that Virginia Woolf had part revised: "The Searchlight"

And 1 "sketch": "The Legacy"

"Solid Objects" starts with two men walking on a beach when one picks up a piece of glass, which develops into a hobby to collect such obhects:

He did not see, or if he had seen would hardly have noticed, that John, after looking at the lump for a moment, as if in hesitation, slipped it inside his pocket. That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it, to enjoy this bliss instead of a life of cold and wet upon the high road. “It might so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I, I!”
...
In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. They were useful, too, for a man who is standing for Parliament upon the brink of a brilliant career has any number of papers to keep in order—addresses to constituents, declarations of policy, appeals for subscriptions, invitations to dinner, and so on.

and eventually an obsession that overtakes his budding Parliamentary career.

"Moments of Being" is subtitled "Slater’s pins have no points" and begins:

“Slater’s pins have no points—don’t you always find that?” said Miss Craye, turning round as the rose fell out of Fanny Wilmot’s dress, and Fanny stooped, with her ears full of the music, to look for the pin on the floor. The words gave her an extraordinary shock, as Miss Craye struck the last chord of the Bach fugue. Did Miss Craye actually go to Slater’s and buy pins then, Fanny Wilmot asked herself, transfixed for a moment. Did she stand at the counter waiting like anybody else, and was she given a bill with coppers wrapped in it, and did she slip them into her purse and then, an hour later, stand by her dressing table and take out the pins? What need had she of pins? For she was not so much dressed as cased, like a beetle compactly in its sheath, blue in winter, green in summer. What need had she of pins—Julia Craye—who lived, it seemed, in the cool glassy world of Bach fugues, playing to herself what she liked, and only consenting to take one or two pupils at the Archer Street College of Music (so the Principal, Miss Kingston, said) as a special favour to herself, who had “the greatest admiration for her in every way.”

with Fanny going on to imagine her way into Julia Craye's life while she hunts for a stray pin on the ground.

"The Searchlight" is an intriguing impressionistic, and quite short, story very open to interpretation.  

"Lappin and Lappinova" is a highly effective portrait of initial infatuation and then the gradual disintegration of a marriage centered around a couple’s nicknames for each other and shared fantasy, that they are both rabbits.

"The Duchess and the Jeweller" is an unusually, for Woolf, conventional story and also one with some worrying tinges of racial stereotyping and anti-Semitism, and that after it was apparently toned down for publication (the original title omitted the 'eller'). Albeit later critics such as Hermione Lee have argued Woolf’s '“offensive caricature” was designed to critique “the habitual Anti-Semitism of her circle” (http://www.joycesociety.or.kr/data/th...).

“The Shooting Party” has rather more plot that one associates with Woolf, a rather dramatised story of a shooting party and a once-rich family in their literally crumbling house, with a melodramatic ending.  Woolf’s framing device, that gives the story a rather ghostly air, is however effective and elevates thew text.  

“The Legacy” has a senior politician disposing of his wife’s effects after her sudden death:

How strange it was, Gilbert Clandon thought once more, that she had left everything in such order—a little gift of some sort for every one of her friends. It was as if she had foreseen her death. Yet she had been in perfect health when she left the house that morning, six weeks ago; when she stepped off the kerb in Piccadilly and the car had killed her.
...
To him, of course, she had left nothing in particular, unless it were her diary. Fifteen little volumes, bound in green leather, stood behind him on her writing table. Ever since they were married, she had kept a diary. Some of their very few—he could not call them quarrels, say tiffs—had been about that diary. When he came in and found her writing, she always shut it or put her hand over it. “No, no, no,” he could hear her say, “After I’m dead—perhaps.” So she had left it him, as her legacy.

As he browses her diaries, he picks out the passages that concern him, at first his wife’s main preoccupation but He skipped on. His own name occurred less frequently. His interest slackened, at least until another name starts to appear more frequently and the truth of their marriage and the accident (ableit a rather telegraphed twist) is revealed.  

“The Lady in The Looking Glass” is subtitled “a reflection” and opens with the intriguing line:

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

The narrator imagines a life of a woman through what is reflected in a looking glass, but the reality, when the subject herself comes into view, is rather disappointing.    For me the main interest here lay mainly in the narrator spelling out the modernist techniques that Woolf uses generally:

If she concealed so much and knew so much one must prize her open with the first tool that came to hand—the imagination.
...
She was thinking, perhaps, that she must order a new net for the strawberries; that she must send flowers to Johnson’s widow; that it was time she drove over to see the Hippesleys in their new house. Those were the things she talked about at dinner certainly. But one was tired of the things that she talked about at dinner. It was her profounder state of being that one wanted to catch and turn to words, the state that is to the mind what breathing is to the body.

Overall, I find it hard to rate this one. If one wanted to buy and read just one collection of Woolf's stories to understand her over her career, then this would be the one to pick for its breadth of style and timespan, as well as being close to an authorised collection. But her complete works (novels and all) are now available on the Kindle for almost no cost if one wants to sample Woolf, and as a collection it doesn't, unlike Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence, at all cohere. And ultimately I'd recommend people to start with the three magnificent novels - The Waves, Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse - which stand as some of the finest English literature of all time. 3.5 stars

[MihaElla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I guess there are no ghosts, and if yes, then there was only one ghost, of course, the holy ghost — and, as we know it, nothing has been heard about it since 2000+ years back. No news, even the Vatican is silent.

There are no ghosts, there are only dead skeletons underneath, yet, surprisingly, Virginia Woolf has fresh news: from room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple

So, I hope the soul goes on moving to new forms (fingers crossed), but it certainly depends on how one has lived, 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?”

I guess one’s whole life essence determines the new form, in other words, what you have desired your whole life and have not been able to fulfill, that desire at the last moment of your life stands as the only thing that determines your life. Like there is nobody directing anything, just it is simply the law. As such, for those that loved each other deeply and truly and passed away, then being by-gone is not a sorry state of affairs, as ’wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy

They don’t stand in mournful recollection about all that had been lost, quite the opposite, they look out for each other again in the house where they had spent together some wonderful joys, so that it would finally return to be a home again, a family home… ”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?

No need for grief, no need for despair, no matter the time passed in-between…

’Here we slept’, she says. And he adds, ‘Kisses without number’. ‘Waking in the morning’, ‘silver between the trees’, ‘upstairs—in the garden, ‘when the summer came---, ‘in the winder snowtime--'Look’, he breaths. ‘Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.’…’Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart .

[Os Livros da Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contos favoritos:
A marca na parede
Lappin e Lapinova
O legado

[Vesna · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are several posthumously published collections of Woolf’s short stories and I chose this one because it was selected and introduced by her husband Leonard Woolf, 3 years after her death. I was even more pleasantly surprised to read in his introduction that this selection came from Virginia’s conversations with him about what short fictions to include in her future collection. “Our idea was that she should produce a volume of critical essays in 1941 and the volume of stories in 1942.” Her tragic suicide in 1941 intervened but LW still made it happen for her short stories with this publication in 1943/44. It includes all but 2 stories from the only collection published during her lifetime, Monday or Tuesday (1921), several stories published in magazines, and the set of unpublished ones most of which she conceived as a cycle of interconnected stories about the guests at a party in her novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Although she is better known for her novels and essays, after reading a few of her stories I was so drawn to her unique style that I couldn’t resist this collection. It’s interesting to read the first-hand account from LW how his wife approached this genre:

All through her life, Virginia Woolf used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, and she felt in the mood to write one (which was not frequent), she would take a sketch out of her drawer and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times. Or if she felt, as she often did, while writing a novel that she required to rest her mind by working at something else for a time, she would either write a critical essay or work upon one of her sketches for short stories.

The title story can be misleading if possibly suggesting that the collection has ghost stories, which is not the case. Even “A Haunted House” is not a typical “ghost” fiction, the genre that consistently fails to appeal to me. I personally experienced it as a beautiful dream-like story about the shared ‘treasure’ of living in the same house between the past and current residents. And it turned out to be one of my favorites, along with some old ones I previously read, now re-reading them with great pleasure, (Kew Gardens, The String Quartet, The Lady in the Looking-Glass) and a few new for me.

They range from short sketches to slightly longer ‘stream of consciousness’ plotless stories. Some make it difficult to draw the line with prose poems, others read almost, though not entirely, as essays. Only about 2-3 were written in the conventional plot-driven form, oddly mostly in her late period, but even then her fluid prose, like seamless continuous transitions between the character’s thoughts and the confessions in his late wife’s diary that he reads in “The Legacy” story, make them uniquely hers.

In most stories her interest is clearly in searching for the truth about the characters (and individuals in general) through their inner monologue or the narrator’s interpretations of their exterior clues. The end result is not always as expected, as in "An Unwritten Novel" or “Moments of Being.”

At other times, a story would be an exploration into the puzzles that surround us, from as simple and trivial as an unusually positioned dot on the wall ("The Mark on the Wall") to our (mostly failed) expectations from our life choices such as marriage, as uncovered in a brilliantly imaginative story "Lappin and Lapinova" and a rather predictable, but still beautifully written, conventional “The Legacy.” I thought that the themes of status-seeking aspirations with their ironic and cruel twists were also perceptively approached in "The New Dress" and "The Duchess and the Jeweller.”

There is one more story that I love very much but it is not included in this collection probably because its final version was written after LW and VW had made plans for publishing her collected short fiction or perhaps it could have been too painful for Leonard to include it (it seems that the latter is less likely). The revised typescript dates from 1 March 1941, entitled “The Symbol” (with the old title “Inconclusions” crossed out), only 4 weeks before her suicide. It’s about the mountain as a symbol, but the question of what it symbolizes in this story is never clearly answered. I would say it stands for death but then it can also be inconclusive… as is the case with many of her other stories which I read more than once and each time uncovered something more, even a greater beauty or subtler meaning than what impressed me on the first reading.

It occurred to me that, although Woolf's short fiction is not as well-known as her novels, her writing was nevertheless in some ways seminal, foreshadowing a few trends favored by many writers today such as blurring the line with essay forms or having a 'novel' as a cycle of interconnected stories (in her case it was never published during her lifetime, but she had an idea and even wrote the 'party' stories for it).

Recommended.

4.5/5

[Maria Clara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un relato tan pero tan corto, de sólo cinco páginas, que no puedo puntuar más.

[Jutta Swietlinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf’s works only a few months ago and couldn’t get enough of her words so far, be it books, short stories, letters or diary entries (I’ve yet to read her essays, but I’m definitely planning to!). It’s just an intoxicating feeling to be able to take a look into the complicated mind of this fascinating, complex writer.
That’s why I couldn’t wait to read this book, which is an excerpt from her Complete Shorter Prose.
And really, the author proves her mastery once more in these short stories. Even more than in the longer prose, she shows her talent for throwing the reader off the scent and creating drama in small, everyday things.
Again I was completely and utterly enchanted by the power of her language. For example, her flower description in Kew Gardens is as intoxicating as a poem of maybe an Impressionist painting.
And of course I loved Slater’s Pins Have No Points, her “little story about Sapphism for the Americans”, as she wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1927.
But: In her story An Unwritten Novel, SHE USES THE N-WORD!!!
Yes, I know that it’s actually not the author speaking, but the thoughts of a character in the story. Yes, I know that the story was written more than a hundred years ago and it was a different time. Yes, I know that VW was a member of the educated middle-class in England who grew up with different rules, ideas and ideals than people do today.
But dear Ms Woolf, despite everything, I think we REALLY need to talk about racism (and classism anyway)! Because in my opinion, using this word is okay under absolutely NO circumstances – and it was wrong back then, too! Which you, as the brilliant thinker you were, should have known as well.
I confess that my heart hurt a lot reading it, maybe even more so as the word is used in such a casual way here. I guess that was basically the moment my literary heroine was knocked off her pedestal … But I’ve been doing my very best to refuse to fall out of love because of her mistake, even though it’s unforgivable.
The rest of the stories are powerful, beautiful, profound, funny, tragic and poignant as ever.
4 Stars, with an uneasy feeling.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

18 short stories. Lots of experimentation by Woolf. Kew Gardens and the perspective of the snail. Several stream of conscious stories. Mrs Dalloway and her house in several. Flowers, skies and the people all show an insight by Woolf. Solid objects obsession, The legacy blindness of one close to you to Woolf’s imagination of people she sees.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of short, impressionistic stories by the woman who famously pioneered the stream of consciousness technique, and equally famously drowned herself by filling her pockets with stones and walking into a lake.

Typical of her style is the following start and end paragraphs from the title story:


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 too!’ ‘It’s upstairs,’ she murmured. ‘And in the garden,’ he whispered. ‘Quietly,’ they said, ‘or we shall wake them.’
...................................................
‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the heart of the house beats proudly. ‘Long years -’ he sighs. ‘Again you found me.’ ‘Here,’ she murmurs, ‘sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure-Stooping, their light lifts the lid upon my eyes. ‘Safe! Safe! Safe!’ the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.’


When I bought this book many years ago I was disappointed because I expected a 'proper' ghost story. But re-reading it now I realise that it really is a proper ghost story, and a heart-rending one at that.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Death was the glass and functioned as a one-way mirror. You see your reflection and sense something beneath the surface, a murkiness beyond, something buried and hidden yet persistent.

This evocative short story (a prose poem really) will elicit different responses from readers. Having recently packed and moved, I identified with the sense of dislocation at the beginning, looking for misplaced objects, wandering through a house in search of what? I'd forgotten. Objects torn from routine slip through my fingers and must always always be searched out.

A house, like a life, has layers of significance, overlapping history, and meaning waiting to be discovered anew. Or maybe I'm just projecting again.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Then she asked herself, “which view is the true one?”

These words, from the final story ‘Summing Up,’ portray perfectly what Woolf is trying to get at in all of these very short stories. The stories showcase Woolf’s talent of relating minutiae; the ephemeral; thoughts that go flying off before circling back to the physical. Several of the stories in the middle, though worth reading, end with almost literal clunkers or even tell us too much, brief though they are; yet at the sentence-level, they are always thought-provoking.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, 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 the dark corridors.”

[Ivy-Mabel Fling · Rating 5 out of 5]

These short stories, snapshots of certain experiences and emotions, are marvellous for people who prefer atmosphere to narrative. In my view nobody can create atmosphere and explore emotional states (moments of being) quite as well as Virginia Woolf. But that's just my view!

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure the short story format really suits Virginia's style. These aren't so much compact, little stories as they are iridescent fragments of stories. I get the impression she was more interested in questions than she was in answers and only ever gave a concluding thought because she had to. Her prose here is exquisite, as always.

(If anyone can explain The Shooting Party or The Searchlight to me, please do!)

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Haunted House — 3
Monday or Tuesday — 3
An Unwritten Novel — 2
The String Quartet — 3.5
Kew Gardens — 4
The Mark on the Wall — 5
The New Dress — 3.5
The Shooting Party — 3.5 - 4
Lappin and Lapinova — 3.5 - 4
Solid Objects — 4
The Lady in the Looking-Glass — 4
The Duchess and the Jeweler — 2.5 - 3
Moments of Being "Slater's Pins Have No Points" — 5
The Main Who Loved His Kind — 3.5
The Searchlight — 3
The Legacy — 2
Together and Apart — 4
A Summing Up — 3

I'm giving this collection a solid four, although, by my calculations, the overall is more of a 3.5 in range, but if GRAmazon will sooner give us puke yellow highlighting of ongoing group reads than it will half star ratings, the latter are never coming at all. The contents of this collection are nicely balanced in a triplet of sextets: the first composing nearly the entirety of Woolf's only sizable non-posthumous collection, 'Monday or Tuesday', of short stories; the second gathered from a scattering of magazines, publicly approved by the author herself; and the third drawn from the unpublished, with only a third of those revised. The middle sextet just barely did the best in my appraisal, largely due to the sheer number of stories that fell within a range of qualities, while the first and the last averaged out the same. If I had to build my own group of sex, I would book end my four stars with each of my five stars: "Moments of Being" first, followed by "Key Gardens", "Solid Objects","The Lady in the Looking Glass", and "Together and Apart"; and finishing with what I believe to be Woolf's crowning achievement in short story fiction, "The Mark on the Wall." Alas, I am no editor or other sort of participant in any sort of publishing house (my brief sojourn as an associated intern was valuable more for its novelty and opportunity to engage in the city life than for any sort of long term career investment), so I will simply note this down for my own purposes and that far off dream of eventually going over my collection of short story reviews and collating a short story anthology of my own.

One of the strengths of Woolf is her (seeming) lack of fear of repetition: thus "Together & Apart" is a perfected form of "The Man Who Loved his Kind" and "Moments of Being" is of "An Unwritten Novel." "Solid Objects" can be seen as a more serious approach to the conceit of "Lappin and Lappinova", and while I"m not sure where the resonance that "Key Gardens" spawns in my mind is coming from, I do feel it, and I do respond to it much as I do to the best of this author. This is my twelfth work of Woolf's, and the temptation of this edition's inlaid, partial bibliography was so great that I made the rare decision to take advantage of my owning this copy and take not, albeit lightly in pencil, which works I had read and which I had planned for this year. Having imbibed such a great amount of Woolf in such a short amount of time, leastwise compared to most authors (of adult literature) that I've read (my first was The Waves eight years back), the individual details have started to merge in my mind. Still, I of course recognized Dalloway in "The New Dress", "The Man Who Loved His Kind", "A Summing Up", and probably at least one other that isn't coming to mind at the moment. The oft thrown around term 'stream of consciousness' is a given, but more interesting to me is the ontology, epistemology, genealogy and even anthropology that inform Woolf's concerns with self-reflexivity, dialectic, culture, and the glistening, splendid, semi-permeable omniscience that continues to attract readers to her writing to this day. She's certainly not for everyone, but having read her for more than a quarter of my lifetime, I've grown to look forward to my yearly Woolf read (I'll be doing double this year with The Years scheduled for a reading challenge than the one I read this work for), she's definitely for me. This particular collection notwithstanding, the fact that, in composition, she was much fonder of the novel and nonfiction than she was of short stories happens to fall in line with my own preferences exactly. Fancy that.

This wasn't my favorite Woolf, but what she does is something I've never seen successfully replicated by any other author. Considering that this collection has around 70% of her entire short story output, it's not surprising that it was its ups and downs. She's no O'Connor, but frankly, that'd be too much power for one author, especially considering the heavily diverging concerns of moment versus fate the two were respectively obsessed with. I can see myself getting to the rest of the stories eventually, although, with 75% of "Monday or Tuesday" read, I'd rather furtively slip it in at some point that devote an entire reading experience/review to it for the sake of another feather (or tuft of fur?) in my cap. I suppose this work might be a good place for wannabe Woolf novices to start if they're looking to whet their curiosity, as the stories that I consider her best are emblematic of the sorts of truths she pursued throughout the entirety of her writing output, with variations on the theme necessitated by the passage of history and subsequent effects of developing technology and such to differentiate and compel. Certain ones, especially the titular story and "Monday or Tuesday" are certainly short enough to pose little trouble, to the point that I'm sure one or another has been posed as a classroom exercise in one specialized semester on literature or another. All in all, another worthy step in my eventual path towards a completionist reading, and while the moment of accomplishment would ring sweet, everything past it may well turn somewhat dead and hollow with the awareness that, barring what violating the author's privacy may afford, there will be no more. A door, then, that may may wish never to be closed.

[Keith Bruton · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.7

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not all the stories are of equal quality (some, according to the intro, not quite finished sketches), but the writing and the observations (focus on minute particulars - the shade cast by a leaf more important in the moment than a war another world away) as well as the unwavering precedence given to highly sensitized individuals (and their relations with other highly sensitized individuals) are consistent and absolutely enthralling and inspiring.

[Taghreed Jamal El Deen · Rating 3 out of 5]

كل كتابات فرجينيا تسكنها الأشباح لا البيت في تلك القصة فقط؛ فرجينيا نفسها تسكنها الأشباح، هي روح قديمة جداً وكهلة جداً، دوماً تشعر بأن الصدى هو من يتكلم من خلالها، هناك إيقاع جنائزي فيما تكتب حتى وهي تحكي عن الأزهار.
مجموعة قصصية تورث انقباضاً في النفس، وبرداً في الروح .. ولهذا السبب بالتحديد تجب قراءتها.

[Missy LeBlanc Ivey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Month of October 2022: Spooky Classics

“A Haunted House and Other Short Stories” by Virginia Woolf (1944; 2021 Kindle Edition). Originally produced by Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, after her death.

Includes 18 short stories:
- “A Haunted House” - p. 2-6
- “Monday or Tuesday” - p. 7-9
- “An Unwritten Novel” - p. 10-24
- “The String Quartet” - p. 25-30
- “Kew Gardens” - p. 31-39
- “The Mark on the Wall” - p. 40-49
- “The New Dress” - p. 50-59
- “The Shooting Party” - p. 60-69
- “Lappin and Lapinova” - p. 71-81
- “Solid Objects” - p. 82-89
- “The Lady in the Looking-Glass” - p. 90-97
- “The Duchess and the Jeweller” - p. 98-108
- “Moments of Being” - p. 109-118
- “The Man Who Loved His Kind” - p. 119-126
- “The Searchlight” - p. 127-134
- “The Legacy” - p. 135-145
- “Together and Apart” - p. 146-153
- “A Summing Up” - p. 154-157

Currently, I have only read “A Haunted House”, as this is spooky month.

But, this is the wrong kind of haunted house. I believe this is more of a love story. An old couple of ghosts meanders through the house they used to live in, and grew old together in, and are reminded of this and that. Kind of “poeticky” [new word]. I’m not sure I even understood it all.

It’s just not my cup of tea.