The Best Short Stories Virginia Woolf E-Book

Virginia Woolf

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Women Writers of the World
• Sprache: Spanisch

Seitenzahl: 158

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

This book brings together the most iconic stories by Virginia Woolf, one of the greatest voices in modern literature. Through captivating and innovative narratives, Woolf invites readers to deep reflections on the human condition, time, and memory, always marked by her unmistakable sensitivity and lyricism. Among the selected stories are "Old Mrs. Grey", which explores the passage of time through the perspective of an elderly woman; "Lappin and Lapinova", a delicate and melancholic portrait of the challenges of intimacy and imagination in marriage; "The Legacy", a surprising tale of secrets and loss; and "Monday or Tuesday", a story that encapsulates her ability to transform ordinary scenes into transcendent experiences. Each text reaffirms Woolf's literary genius, her skill in capturing psychological nuances, and her invaluable contribution to literature. This collection is essential for readers eager for stories that challenge and enchant, revealing the beauty hidden in life's details.

Leseprobe

Virginia Woolf

BEST SHORT STORIES

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Contents

INTRODUCTION

BEST SHORT STORIES VIRGINIA WOOLF

Old Mrs. Grey

Lappin and Lapinova

The Searchlight

The Shooting Party

The Legacy

The Duchess and the Jeweler

Monday or Tuesday

Kew Gardens

A Haunted House

The New Dress

Solid Objects

INTRODUCTION

Virginia Woolf

1882 – 1941

Virginia Woolf was an English writer and a central figure in modernist literature. Renowned for her innovative narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness, and her exploration of themes like identity, time, and the inner workings of the mind, Woolf’s works have left an indelible mark on 20th-century literature. She was also a prominent feminist, whose essays and novels challenged the social norms of her time and advocated for women's intellectual and creative freedom.

Early Life and Education

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, into a highly intellectual family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable historian and biographer, and her mother, Julia Stephen, was a model and philanthropist. Woolf received no formal education but was taught at home by her parents and had access to her father's extensive library, which nurtured her love for literature. The deaths of her mother, father, and siblings during her youth deeply affected her mental health, shaping her perspective and creativity.

Career and Contributions

Woolf began her career as a writer with book reviews and essays for various publications. Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), introduced her experimental style, but it was with Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) that she gained widespread acclaim. These works exemplify her stream-of-consciousness technique, capturing the intricate flow of characters’ thoughts and emotions.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf intricately intertwines a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway with broader themes of societal expectation and mental health. To the Lighthouse, considered one of her masterpieces, explores family dynamics and the passage of time, juxtaposing human impermanence with the enduring forces of nature.

Woolf was also an influential essayist. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), she famously argued for women's financial and intellectual independence as prerequisites for artistic achievement. Her feminist perspectives and critiques of patriarchal systems remain seminal in gender studies and literary criticism.

Impact and Legacy

Woolf’s work redefined the possibilities of the modern novel, emphasizing psychological depth and subjective reality over linear plot structures. Her writings have inspired countless authors and thinkers, influencing literary movements like postmodernism and feminist literature.

She was a co-founder of the Hogarth Press with her husband, Leonard Woolf, which published works by key modernist figures, including T.S. Eliot and Sigmund Freud, as well as Woolf’s own writings. This venture solidified her role as both an author and a cultural tastemaker.

Death and Legacy

Virginia Woolf’s lifelong struggles with mental health culminated in her tragic death by suicide in 1941. Despite her untimely end, Woolf’s legacy endures as one of the most important voices of modernism. Her ability to delve into the complexities of human consciousness and her commitment to social change through art have cemented her place in literary history.

Today, Woolf’s works continue to resonate, offering profound insights into the human condition and the ever-evolving struggles for equality and understanding. Her influence stretches beyond literature, shaping discussions in philosophy, gender studies, and psychology, and ensuring her relevance in the modern world.

About the Work

In The Best Short Stories Virginia Woolf, readers will find a carefully curated selection of her most representative stories, offering a deep dive into the profound and ever-flowing river that was Virginia Woolf’s life. One of the most significant writers of the 20th century.

BEST SHORT STORIES VIRGINIA WOOLF

Old Mrs. Grey

There are moments even in England, now, when even the busiest, most contented suddenly let fall what they hold — it may be the week's washing. Sheets and pyjamas crumble and dissolve in their hands, because, though they do not state this in so many words, it seems silly to take the washing round to Mrs. Peel when out there over the fields over the hills, there is no washing; no pinning of clothes to lines; mangling and ironing no work at all, but boundless rest. Stainless and boundless rest; space unlimited; untrodden grass; wild birds flying hills whose smooth uprise continue that wild flight.

Of all this however only seven foot by four could be seen from Mrs. Grey's corner. That was the size of her front door which stood wide open, though there was a fire burning in the grate. The fire looked like a small spot of dusty light feebly trying to escape from the embarrassing pressure of the pouring sunshine.

Mrs. Grey sat on a hard chair in the corner looking — but at what? Apparently at nothing. She did not change the focus of her eyes when visitors came in. Her eyes had ceased to focus themselves; it may be that they had lost the power. They were aged eyes, blue, unspectacled. They could see, but without looking. She had never used her eyes on anything minute and difficult; merely upon faces, and dishes and fields. And now at the age of ninety-two they saw nothing but a zigzag of pain wriggling across the door, pain that twisted her legs as it wriggled; jerked her body to and fro like a marionette. Her body was wrapped round the pain as a damp sheet is folded over a wire. The wire was spasmodically jerked by a cruel invisible hand. She flung out a foot, a hand. Then it stopped. She sat still for a moment.

In that pause she saw herself in the past at ten, at twenty, at twenty-five. She was running in and out of a cottage with eleven brothers and sisters. The line jerked. She was thrown forward in her chair.

"All dead. All dead," she mumbled. "My brothers and sisters. And my husband gone. My daughter too. But I go on. Every morning I pray God to let me pass."

The morning spread seven foot by four green and sunny. Like a fling of grain the birds settled on the land. She was jerked again by another tweak of the tormenting hand.

"I'm an ignorant old woman. I can't read or write, and every morning when I crawls down stairs, I say I wish it were night; and every night, when I crawls up to bed, I say, I wish it were day. I'm only an ignorant old woman. But I prays to God: O let me pass. I'm an ignorant old woman — I can't read or write."

So when the colour went out of the doorway, she could not see the other page which is then lit up; or hear the voices that have argued, sung, talked for hundreds of years.

The jerked limbs were still again.

"The doctor comes every week. The parish doctor now. Since my daughter went, we can't afford Dr. Nicholls. But he's a good man. He says he wonders I don't go. He says my heart's nothing but wind and water. Yet I don't seem able to die."

So we — humanity — insist that the body shall still cling to the wire. We put out the eyes and the ears; but we pinion it there, with a bottle of medicine, a cup of tea, a dying fire, like a rook on a barn door; but a rook that still lives, even with a nail through it.

THE END

THREE PICTURES

The First Picture

It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to each other. We cannot possibly break out of the frame of the picture by speaking natural words. You see me leaning against the door of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hand and you think as you go by: "How picturesque!" I, seeing you sitting so much at your ease in the car, almost as if you were going to bow to the populace, think what a picture of old luxurious aristocratical England! We are both quite wrong in our judgments no doubt, but that is inevitable.

So now at the turn of the road I saw one of these pictures. It might have been called "The Sailor's Homecoming" or some such title. A fine young sailor carrying a bundle; a girl with her hand on his arm; neighbours gathering round; a cottage garden ablaze with flowers; as one passed one read at the bottom of that picture that the sailor was back from China, and there was a fine spread waiting for him in the parlour; and he had a present for his young wife in his bundle; and she was soon going to bear him their first child. Everything was right and good and as it should be, one felt about that picture.

There was something wholesome and satisfactory in the sight of such happiness; life seemed sweeter and more enviable than before.

So thinking I passed them, filling in the picture as fully, as completely as I could, noticing the colour of her dress, of his eyes, seeing the sandy cat slinking round the cottage door.

For some time the picture floated in my eyes, making most things appear much brighter, warmer, and simpler than usual; and making some things appear foolish; and some things wrong and some things right, and more full of meaning than before. At odd moments during that day and the next the picture returned to one's mind, and one thought with envy, but with kindness, of the happy sailor and his wife; one wondered what they were doing, what they were saying now. The imagination supplied other pictures springing from that first one, a picture of the sailor cutting firewood, drawing water; and they talked about China; and the girl set his present on the chimney-piece where everyone who came could see it; and she sewed at her baby clothes, and all the doors and windows were open into the garden so that the birds were flittering and the bees humming, and Rogers — that was his name — could not say how much to his liking all this was after the China seas. As he smoked his pipe, with his foot in the garden.

The Second Picture

In the middle of the night a loud cry rang through the village. Then there was a sound of something scuffling; and then dead silence. All that could be seen out of the window was the branch of lilac tree hanging motionless and ponderous across the road. It was a hot still night. There was no moon. The cry made everything seem ominous. Who had cried? Why had she cried? It was a woman's voice, made by some extremity of feeling almost sexless, almost expressionless. It was as if human nature had cried out against some iniquity, some inexpressible horror. There was dead silence. The stars shone perfectly steadily. The fields lay still. The trees were motionless. Yet all seemed guilty, convicted, ominous. One felt that something ought to be done. Some light ought to appear tossing, moving agitatedly. Someone ought to come running down the road. There should be lights in the cottage windows. And then perhaps another cry, but less sexless, less wordless, comforted, appeased. But no light came. No feet were heard. There was no second cry. The first had been swallowed up, and there was dead silence.

One lay in the dark listening intently. It had been merely a voice. There was nothing to connect it with. No picture of any sort came to interpret it, to make it intelligible to the mind. But as the dark arose at last all one saw was an obscure human form, almost without shape, raising a gigantic arm in vain against some overwhelming iniquity.

The Third Picture

The fine weather remained unbroken. Had it not been for that single cry in the night one would have felt that the earth had put into harbour; that life had ceased to drive before the wind; that it had reached some quiet cove and there lay anchored, hardly moving, on the quiet waters. But the sound persisted. Wherever one went, it might be for a long walk up into the hills, something seemed to turn uneasily beneath the surface, making the peace, the stability all round one seem a little unreal. There were the sheep clustered on the side of the hill; the valley broke in long tapering waves like the fall of smooth waters. One came on solitary farmhouses. The puppy rolled in the yard. The butterflies gambolled over the gorse. All was as quiet, as safe could be. Yet, one kept thinking, a cry had rent it; all this beauty had been an accomplice that night; had consented; to remain calm, to be still beautiful; at any moment it might be sundered again. This goodness, this safety were only on the surface.

And then to cheer oneself out of this apprehensive mood one turned to the picture of the sailor's homecoming. One saw it all over again producing various little details — the blue color of her dress, the shadow that fell from the yellow flowering tree — that one had not used before. So they had stood at the cottage door, he with his bundle on his back, she just lightly touching his sleeve with her hand. And a sandy cat had slunk round the door. Thus gradually going over the picture in every detail, one persuaded oneself by degrees that it was far more likely that this calm and content and good will lay beneath the surface than anything treacherous, sinister. The sheep grazing, the waves of the valley, the farmhouse, the puppy, the dancing butterflies were in fact like that all through. And so one turned back home, with one's mind fixed on the sailor and his wife, making up picture after picture of them so that one picture after another of happiness and satisfaction might be laid over that unrest, that hideous cry, until it was crushed and silenced by their pressure out of existence.

Here at last was the village, and the churchyard through which one must pass; and the usual thought came, as one entered it, of the peacefulness of the place, with its shady yews, its rubbed tombstones, its nameless graves. Death is cheerful here, one felt. Indeed, look at that picture! A man was digging a grave, and children were picnicking at the side of it while he worked. As the shovels of yellow earth were thrown up, the children were sprawling about eating bread and jam and drinking milk out of large mugs. The gravedigger's wife, a fat fair woman, had propped herself against a tombstone and spread her apron on the grass by the open grave to serve as a tea-table. Some lumps of clay had fallen among the tea things. Who was going to be buried, I asked. Had old Mr. Dodson died at last? "Oh! no. It's for young Rogers, the sailor," the woman answered, staring at me. "He died two nights ago, of some foreign fever. Didn't you hear his wife?" She rushed into the road and cried out..."Here, Tommy, you're all covered with earth!"

What a picture it made!

THE END

MOMENTS OF BEING: "SLATER'S PINS HAVE NO POINTS"

"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, to take one or two pupils at the one and only consenting Archer Street College of Music (so the Principal, Miss Kingston, said) as a special favor to herself, who had "the greatest admiration for her in every way." Miss Craye was left badly off, Miss Kingston was afraid, at her brother's death. Oh, they used to have such lovely things, when they lived at Salisbury, and her brother Julius was, of course, a very well-known man: a famous archaeologist. It was a great privilege to stay with them, Miss Kingston said ("My family had always known them — they were regular Canterbury people," Miss Kingston said), but a little frightening for a child; one had to be careful not to slam the door or bounce into the room unexpectedly. Miss Kingston, who gave little character sketches like this on the first day of term while she received cheques and wrote out receipts for them, smiled here. Yes, she had been rather a tomboy; she had bounced in and set all those green Roman glasses and things jumping in their case. The Crayes were not used to children. The Crayes were none of them married. They kept cats; the cats, one used to feel, knew as much about the Roman urns and things as anybody.

"Far more than I did!" said Miss Kingston brightly, writing her name across the stamp in her dashing, cheerful, full-bodied hand, for she had always been practical. That was how she made her living, after all.

Perhaps then, Fanny Wilmot thought, looking for the pin, Miss Craye said that about "Slater's pins having no points," at a venture. None of the Crayes had ever married. She knew nothing about pins — nothing whatever.

But she wanted to break the spell that had fallen on the house; to break the pane of glass which separated them from other people. When Polly Kingston, that merry little girl, had slammed the door and made the Roman vases jump, Julius, seeing that no harm was done (that would be his first instinct) looked, for the case was stood in the window, at Polly skipping home across the fields; looked with the look his sister often had, that lingering, driving look.