7 best short stories by Virginia Woolf E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Tacet Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: 7 best short stories
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 99

Beschreibung

Dive into the mesmerizing world of Virginia Woolf, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. In this collection, Woolf delicately unravels the threads of human consciousness, capturing fleeting moments, hidden desires, and the profound mysteries of existence. Her masterful use of stream-of-consciousness invites readers to explore haunted houses, lush gardens, and the deepest landscapes of the mind. Each story takes you on a journey where time bends, and the smallest details unlock life's deepest truths. A must-read for those eager to experience life from Woolf's timeless and unique perspective.

This collection includes:

A Haunted House: A ghostly couple wanders through a house in search of a hidden treasure. As echoes of the past resound, mysteries shroud the house, and its silent shadows hold untold secrets.

Kew Gardens: In a vibrant garden, lives intertwine, revealing memories, desires, and hidden secrets, scattered through conversations and nature's slow rhythms.

An Unwritten Novel: During a train journey, a woman imagines the life of another passenger. Through silent thoughts and speculative dialogues, she delves into the mysteries of human existence.

Solid Objects: After a heated argument, one of two friends becomes fascinated by a piece of glass found on a beach. This obsession with discarded objects transforms his life, diverting him from a once-promising future.

The Mark on the Wall: While staring at a mark on the wall, the narrator embarks on a series of reflections about life, time, and perception. What seems simple reveals far more than expected.

Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street: While shopping for gloves, Mrs. Dalloway reflects on life, encounters, and memories, immersed in the pulse of London. Every mundane detail stirs deep recollections.

The Lady in the Looking Glass: Isabella's life, reflected in a mirror, appears fascinating and mysterious. But as her image sharpens, the truth about her inner emptiness comes to light.

Leseprobe

Introduction

Virginia Woolf was one of the most important modernist writers of the 20th century, known for her innovative stream-of-consciousness technique and her sensitivity in exploring the complexities of the human mind. Born in 1882 into a prominent intellectual family, Woolf was exposed early on to literature and critical thinking, which profoundly influenced her literary output. Her childhood, marked by summers spent at the family’s country home in St Ives, Cornwall, and by intense family and social ties, shaped her view of the dualities between the external and internal worlds— a central characteristic of her work.

Her literary education, although informal, was rich. Woolf had unrestricted access to her father Leslie Stephen’s vast library, a prominent literary critic. This early exposure to the classics, combined with frequent conversations with renowned intellectuals, fostered her desire to innovate in both the form and content of literature. After the deaths of her parents and older siblings, Virginia moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury neighborhood in London, where she joined a group of intellectuals that would become the famous Bloomsbury Group. This group openly discussed artistic, literary, and social themes, nurturing the creative environment that allowed Woolf to develop her ideas about literature.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, but it was only in 1915 that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, amid a series of mental health crises that would accompany her throughout her life. From this work, she challenged Victorian conventions of writing, inaugurating her quest for a literary form that captured not only external events but also the subjectivity of human experiences. Her work was deeply influenced by modernist debates, especially about the representation of reality and the role of art.

In the following years, Woolf published a series of novels that would become classics of English literature, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). These novels not only revolutionized literary narrative with their fragmented and introspective structure but also explored fundamental questions about identity, memory, and the role of women in society. Woolf, a staunch advocate for women's rights, addressed these issues more explicitly in her essay A Room of One's Own (1929), where she argues that women need both physical and financial space to create.

Throughout her career, Woolf also devoted herself to the short story genre, where she frequently explored the boundaries between reality and imagination, the internal and the external. Stories like The Mark on the Wall and The Lady in the Looking Glass are perfect examples of her ability to transform everyday moments into profound reflections on life, death, and the unknown.

Despite her significant contributions to literature and feminist thought, Woolf struggled with severe bouts of depression and anxiety throughout her life. These battles tragically culminated in 1941 when she took her own life. However, her legacy remains immense, both in terms of literary innovation and her advocacy for the role of women in art and society.

With a body of work that continues to be studied and admired worldwide, Virginia Woolf remains one of the most powerful and original voices of 20th-century literature, challenging the conventions of her time and paving the way for writers who came after her.

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 machine1 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 sky2; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs3. "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 a heart.

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."

Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.

"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."

Kew Gardens

From the oval shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens4 in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly5 kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say 'Yes' at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhereof course not, happily not, or I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the childrenTell me, Eleanor. D'you ever think of the past?"

"Why do you ask, Simon?"

"Because I've been thinking of the past. I've been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?"

"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one's happiness, one's reality?"

"For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly"

"For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I'd ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes onlyit was so preciousthe kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."

They walked on the past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.