num_pages: 313
description: This volume brings together for the first time all of Virginia Woolf's short stories and sketches. In addition to those that have already appeared in short story collections and periodicals are sixteen stories never before published. These forty-five pieces, in all, are presented chronologically and cover the range of Virginia Woolf's writing career. The earliest story, "Phyllis and Rosamond," dates from 1906, shortly after she began to publish essays and reviews. "The Watering Place" was written a few weeks before her death in 1941 and was probably her last finished piece of fiction.Although a number of the stories are traditional in form, others are near-essays, sketches, or lyrical prose reveries. Throughout her life Virginia Woolf used short fiction to test narrative techniques she would later employ in her novels. She wrote in 1908 that she wished "to reform the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive." The stories "The Mark on the Wall" and "An Unwritten Novel" prepared the way for her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room. "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street," which explored her character's inner life, grew into the novel Mrs. Dalloway. And the eight stories that followed, partly collected under the title Mrs. Dalloway's Party, used narrative methods brought to perfection in To the Lighthouse.To read through this volume, then, is to follow the development of Virginia Woolf's art as well as to encounter continuous delights for the mind.
language: English
title: The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
titlecomplete: The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
genres: Fiction, Short Stories, British Literature, Womens, Literature, Classics, Feminism, Short Story Collection, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 1617
publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich