Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' previous book, The Hidden Life of Dogs , was a bestseller. For those daunted by the muscular weight of The Waves or To the Lighthouse , the re-released Kew Gardens is a shorter Virginia Woolf in full stride. The sentences themselves are still strong examples of Woolf's ability to tangle with words, cascade language, and create a rush of hard-hitting forward motion as one syllable pushes against the next. A single moment in a garden becomes a vortex of ghosts, memory, lust, and ultimately the entire lack of consequence as each human life fades to nothing. The book itself is constructed to be less imposing than an illustrated coffee-table book, just slightly more in the hand than a child's Little Golden Book.
Writing is on one side of each page only, the back left blank.
Large text is surrounded by abstract, organic ink drawings created by Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell. The original version of Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens was published in limited edition in 1927 by Woolf's own publishing house, Hogarth Press.