Modernist Fiction – Interesting Literature

Mrs Dalloway’s First Outing: The Voyage Out

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Virginia Woolf’s first foray into the novel

A sure-fire way to set the ‘klaxons’ off on the popular BBC panel show QI – where panellists have to avoid giving the obvious-but-wrong answer to interesting questions – is to ask, ‘Which Virginia Woolf novel first featured Mrs Dalloway?’ Of course, the question already feels like a trap, and Alan Davies would be right to be wary. For Mrs Dalloway (1925), perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, came ten years after Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). And it is in The Voyage Out that we first find Clarissa Dalloway, albeit in a slightly different form from her later, more introspective party-throwing incarnation.

A Summary and Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Written in 1917 around the same time she wrote ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’ is one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known short stories. Yet what the story means is far less well-known – if there is one ‘meaning’ that is ultimately knowable. A short summary and closer analysis of ‘Kew Gardens’ should help to provide a little clarity on what is a rather elusive and delicately symbolic story.

The Best Virginia Woolf Stories Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Previously, we’ve picked the best of Virginia Woolf’s novels and non-fiction works, but she was also a fine writer of very short stories. Although Woolf didn’t write a great amount of short fiction, a number of her short stories are classic examples of early twentieth-century modernism. All five stories are included in The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction (Oxford World’s Classics), which is a treasure-trove of very short modernist fiction by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.

‘The Mark on the Wall’.

In this short story, the narrator tells us about a mark she noticed on the wall; what follows is, essentially, is eight pages of stream of consciousness as we follow the narrator’s thoughts, memories, and daydreams. The mark on the wall is jumping-off-point, but the ‘life’ of the story resides in what goes on in the narrator’s mind: Woolf is telling us that the material world is not everything, since there is an almost spiritual delight in the life of the mind which conventional fiction seldom takes into account. The rock group Modest Mouse took their band name from a phrase in this story.