Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction

Name: Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction
Author: Virginia Woolf
ISBN: 9780198838135

by Virginia Woolf, Bryony Randall, David Bradshaw

160 pages2021Oxford University PressISBN 9780198838135

Fiction

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About this book

Virginia Woolf’s short fiction has long been acknowledged as the place where she tried out some of her more experimental techniques before adopting and adapting them for use in her novel-length works. While this is certainly true, it is also the case that these short pieces are now increasingly being recognized as important works of art in their own right, rather than simply flights of experimental fancy awaiting their full actualization in the novel form. This new edition edited by Bryony Randall emphasises the startling variety in Woolf’s experimentation during the most productive period of short fiction writing in Woolf’s life, the late 1910s through to the end of the 1920s. It draws readers’ attention to the deep political engagements evident across the range of her work and on the recent burgeoning of work in modernist print culture to set out the importance of the material context of these works’ initial publication and reception.

Publication Details

Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021
Pages: 160
ISBN: 9780198838135
Language: en

About Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, diarist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. ([Source][1].) [Comment from Ursula Le Guin on The Guardian][2]: > You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven't read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf. > I was 17 when I read [Orlando][3]. It was half-revelation, half-confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I'm thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere. > How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader's imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous, complete. > In [Flush][4], Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human brain, an alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again what I learned was the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at the dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking what are your dreams? and listening . . . sniffing the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless world. > Useful stuff, for those who