Archives for 2014

The Canary

December 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Canary was written on 7 July, 1922 at the Hotel Chateau Bellevue in Sierre, Switzerland as a gift for Dorothy Brett with whom Katherine Mansfield had lived briefly in Bloomsbury. It was her last completed story and was only published after her death in 1923. The original inspiration for the story came from her stay at the Victoria Palace Hotel in Paris, where she used to watch a woman across the street tending canaries in a cage.

The Canary – critical commentary

This is one of Mansfield’s essentially static and non-dramatic stories with very little sense of narrative development and a complete absence of dramatic events. It is more like a very light character sketch combined with an evocation of an emotional state of being – the sort of modernist experiment with the short story as a literary genre that Mansfield had been pursuing at the same time as her great contemporary (and friend) Virginia Woolf.

Like most of her best work, it relies on understatement and a delicate symbolism for its effect. An elderly woman finding comfort in a pet creature is a common enough phenomenon, and Mansfield creates a credible account of the pleasure and reassurance she gains from the bird’s song. But at the same time we are reminded of her half-formed yearnings which were previously attached to her waiting for the evening star – Venus.

Venus was the Roman goddess whose functions encompassed love, beauty, sex, fertility, prosperity and desire – none of which seem to have featured largely in the woman’s life. This small piece of domestic sadness is reinforced by the fact that she is aware that the three male lodgers call her ‘the Scarecrow’, but reassures herself that ‘It doesn’t matter. Not in the least.’ Nevertheless, without the bird in its cage, she now feels an inchoate sense of loneliness and sadness which she can neither articulate nor explain to herself.

The old woman’s hesitancy and point of view are neatly reflected in Mansfield’s presentation of the first person narrative. Every paragraph begins with an ellipsis (…); the woman addresses an imaginary interlocutor – ‘You see that big nail on the right of the front door?’ – and she feels she must not ‘giv[e] way to — to memories and so on’.

The Canary – study resources

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon UK

Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Works
Three published collections of stories – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Wordsworth Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
Penguin Classics paperback edition – Amazon US

Katherine Mansfield Megapack
The complete stories and poems in Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Canary – plot summary

An elderly woman is recalling the pleasure she has derived from her pet canary, which is now dead. The bird had a particularly beautiful song.

In the past she had focused her spiritual yearnings on the nightly appearance of a star (Venus) but she has transferred these feelings onto the bird as soon as it was acquired.

She looks after three men as lodgers, and views the bird as a male companion. She is aware that the lodgers view her with disdain, but finds comfort in the presence of the bird.

Even when she feels existentially threatened by a bad dream and a dark night, she feels the bird’s chirping as a comforting presence.

Now that the bird has died she knows that she ought to get over the loss, but feels an emptiness and sadness in life that she cannot explain.

Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations
0415402395

Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

More on Katherine Mansfield
Twentieth century literature
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on short stories

The Chase

December 4, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Chase (El Acoso) was first published in 1956 whilst Alejo Carpentier was living in Venezuela, in self-imposed exile from what he regarded as his native Cuba, which was under the dictatorship of General Batista at the time. Although neither the fictional country nor the city is named in the novel, most commentators accept that he captures the spirit (and the terror) of Havana during a period of political persecution and social unrest.

Old Havana

The Chase – critical commentary

Literary style

Carpentier’s literary style is not dissimilar to that of two other modernists, Woolf and Joyce, in seeking to achieve a sense of temporal simultaneity in his prose. He writes about more than one subject and one period in the story at the same time, by switching from one topic or character to another, often within the same sentence.

It is significant that in general he makes very little use of the paragraph, and extensive use of the ellipsis (…) the semicolon, and the dash – as this passage describing the fugitive’s fear in the concert hall demonstrates:

It might be a Sign; my eyes will try to avoid it, looking above it, below it, finally making me dizzy; I must clench my teeth, clench my fists, calm my stomach—calm my stomach—I must stop that running sensation in my guts, that breakdown of my kidneys which sends sweat to my chest; one thrust and another, one jolt and another; I must tighten myself up, cover up the falling apart inside, cover up what’s flowing out of me, boiling out of me; piercing me; I must tighten myself up over the thing that’s drilling and burning, in this immobility to which I am condemned, here, where my head must remain at the same height as every other head.

Carpentier also narrates the fictional past and present simultaneously. The fugitive is trying to escape from his assailants from the very beginning of the novel, but mingled with his thoughts and fears, we are gradually given the account of his past.

He also mixes first and third person narrative modes – third person objective statements recounting the fugitive’s movements and descriptions of the city, and at the same time first-person accounts of his thoughts, fears, and memories.

Structure

Despite the complexities of the narrative and the manner in which the story is delivered, the structure of the novel is quite simple. In Part I, the un-named fugitive arrives at the concert hall, on the run from his assailants. He gives the student ticket seller a fake banknote, which the student then unsuccessfully tries to spend through buying a night with the prostitute Estrella.

The events of Part II take place before those of Part I, and reveal the desperate life of the fugitive as a political agent, an assassin, and a traitor up to that point. He too has been a client of Estrella’s, and is now in fear of his life after betraying his comrades.

Part III of the narrative goes back to the point at which it broke off in Part I, and the story concludes with the student returning from the prostitute, the end of the concert, and the shooting of the fugitive.

There are several neat structural links between the separate parts of the story. When the fugitive gives the fake (or out-of-date) banknote to the ticket seller, the student tries (unsuccessfully) to buy a night with the prostitute Estrella. But we learn later that the fugitive has also been a regular client of Estrella’s, and has had the banknote turned down by her for the same reason earlier on the same day.

Moreover, the ticket seller is a student of music, and the fugitive has previously been a student of architecture before his activities as a political undercover agent. Both music and architecture were favourite subjects of Carpentier himself. He wrote a study of Music in Cuba (1946).

There are other small details which tie the two parts of the story together. In Part I the ticket seller is fascinated by the erotic spectacle of the lady in the fox fur who has removed some undergarment because of the heat. And in Part III when the fugitive is hiding in the concert hall, he too notices the same woman who is a member of the audience.

Novel or novella?

The Chase is sometimes referred to as a novel or a short novel, but in fact it has all the characteristics of the novella in terms of unity of character, place, time, action, and theme.

The whole narrative is concerned with just one character – the un-named fugitive – with the ticket seller and Estrella acting as very incidental characters of secondary importance.

In terms of place, the entire narrative unfolds in the city (of Havana) with no extraneous locations or shifts of scene. And it can be argued that the time or action are even more concentrated. Although Part II of the narrative recounts the background to the fugitive’s desperate life, the real events of the story begin with his abrupt dash to hide in the auditorium (Part I) and end shortly afterwards when the concert ends and he is shot dead. This is a time span of less than the performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony which is being played.

This leaves us with the question of the theme.

What is the theme of the text?

There is normally an expectation that the central character in a novella will be tragic or at least admirable, but the fugitive in The Chase does not seem to qualify for either of these categories. He has been a student of the humanities, but has drifted into violent political activism as a member of the Communist Party. This might still be regarded as heroic in the tyranny of General Batista’s Cuban dictatorship which forms the backdrop to the story, except for two further issues.

The fugitive goes on to betray his colleagues when threatened with torture. This too might be seen as an understandable human weakness, but he also has another guilty secret. He appears to be working as a double agent – because he believes he has the protection of the ‘Exalted Personage’ – presumably a member of the government dictatorship against which the rebels are fighting. From this source he is hoping to obtain an exit visa and money to escape.

When this avenue of relief is closed with the destruction of the Personage’s villa, his personal drama reaches its climax in the cafe when he spots two men who are going to kill him. He believes that these assassins are acting for the rebels, seeking revenge for his betrayal, but they turn out to be police, acting for the government. If there is a tragedy here therefore, it is perhaps the tragedy of a society under the tyranny of a dictatorship, and the lengths to which some of its citizens are driven.

The Chase – study resources

The Chase – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

El Acoso – at Amazon UK – (text in Spanish)

The Chase ) – at Amazon US – (text in English

El Acoso – at Amazon US – (text in Spanish)

The Chase – plot summary

Part I

In an un-named Latin-American city (Havana), a young music student is working as a ticket-seller in a concert hall, meanwhile reading a biography of Beethoven. When a fugitive enters the hall pursued by two men, he leaves a large banknote at the ticket office.

The fugitive hides in the audience, consumed by a terror-stricken panic that he will be discovered. He feels oppressed by the music, and invokes his religious faith to support himself.

The music student is with the prostitute Estrella, who complains of an ‘Inquisition’ by the authorities. When he offers her the banknote, it turns out to be worthless, so she throws him out. He thinks back to a childhood sweetheart and feels humiliated by his lack of worldly success, finally returning to the concert hall just before the performance ends.

Part II

The fugitive is hiding out in an old house with a belvedere, protected by an old woman who was once his nurse. He is waiting for details of an ‘Arrangement’.

He has been a student of architecture and also a member of the Communist Party. He is now disciplining himself for some task that awaits him. He is trying desperately to battle against hunger.

He endures four days without eating, and fantasises about eating wood and boiled leather. But he remains in hiding, behind a barricaded door.

He finds logical reasons for justifying his intense religious beliefs, and hears music coming from an adjacent building, then discovers that the old woman has died. He is fearful of going back into society and being recognised.

He attends the wake of the old woman, then goes back fearfully into the streets, making his way to the house of Estrella the prostitute.

He spends the night with Estrella, but feels slighted by her. She in her turn, and despite a certain pride in herself, feels degraded by her profession.

He gives instructions to Estrella to collect information from an important person on the other side of the city. But she returns telling him that the banknote he has given her is a fake. When an argument develops outside, the fugitive escapes by a rear exit.

The fugitive makes his way in the shadows towards a house of rendezvous. He has assassinated a politician with an exploding book, and has recently been in prison where he has confessed and betrayed his accomplices. He wants his government contact to provide him with an exit visa and some money.

He thinks back to his desperate actions as a revolutionary, during which time he has taken part in a tribunal which resulted in a vote to execute one of his comrades.

He has participated as an under-cover agent and committed acts of political violence that have left him feeling ashamed. Arriving at the house of his high office protector, he finds it in ruins.

He has also been part of an assassination squad and graduated in the ‘bureaucracy of terror’. But after the exploding book incident claimed its two victims he has been arrested and threatened with torture – at which point he has capitulated and betrayed his colleagues.

He finds refuge in a church where a marriage is taking place, and hopes to find spiritual comfort by confessing his sins to a priest. But when the ceremony is over, the parish priest turns him out and tells him to come back next day.

Trying to return to the funeral wake as his only place of refuge, he is intercepted by two rabid student fans of violence. Then, as a storm begins, he spots two men with guns watching him, and narrowly escapes them into the concert hall.

Part III

He cowers in the hall, thinking that his former colleagues are waiting for him outside, ready to execute him for his betrayals. He finally decides that the safest thing will be to stay behind, hiding in the hall when the concert is over.

The student ticket collector is in the act of closing up when two policemen stay on after the performance and shoot the fugitive where he is hiding.

Alejo Carpentier – other works

The Kingdom of This World is a marvelously compressed account of the slave uprising and first revolution of the early nineteenth century in San Domingo – now Haiti. Carpentier uses ‘magical realism’, long before it became fashionable, to depict the contradictions between political reality and religious or mythical beliefs. The story passes rapidly in a series of vivid scenes from the early unsuccessful uprising led by Macandal, then Bouckman who led Haiti in its fight for independence from France, and finally to Henri Christophe the revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel.
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The Lost Steps (1953) is a story told twice. A disillusioned north-American musicologist flees his empty existence in New York City. He takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization – the upper reaches of a great South American river (which we take to be the Amazon). The novel describes his search, his adventures, the revival of his creative powers, and the remarkable decision he makes about his life in a village that seems to be truly outside history. This novel offers a wonderful evocations of Latin America from the founder of ‘Magical Realism’.
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Alejo Carpentier weblinks

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

More on Alejo Carpentier
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf

November 26, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all Woolf’s shorter fiction. She wrote many of these stories as experimental sketches or exercises in which she developed new techniques for prose fiction and the art of story-telling. The majority of the stories were written between 1917 and the early 1930s – a period which also saw the creation of her most famous modernist novels. The series is an on-going compilation and is shown here in alphabetical order. Dates given are for first publication.

A Haunted House — (1921)
A Simple Melody — (1925)
A Summing Up — (1944)
An Unwritten Novel — (1920)
Ancestors — (1923)
Happiness — (1925)
In the Orchard — (1923)
Kew Gardens — (1917)
Moments of Being — (1925)
Monday or Tuesday — (1921)
Phyllis and Rosamond — (1906)
Solid Objects — (1920)
Sympathy — (1919)
The Evening Party — (1920)
The Introduction — (1925)
The Lady in the Looking-Glass — (1929)
The Legacy — (1940)
The Man who Loved his Kind — (1944)
The Mark on the Wall — (1917)
The Mysterious Case of Miss V — (1906)
The New Dress — (1927)
The Shooting Party — (1938)
The String Quartet — (1921)
The Symbol — (1930s)
The Watering Place — (1941)
Together and Apart — (1944)

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad

November 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all the shorter fiction of Joseph Conrad. The stories are commonly given the name ‘tales’ or ‘shorter fiction’ because hardly any of them are now what would be considered traditional short stories. Some of them were originally published as serials in magazines, as was common with novels at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one or two (such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line) are now commonly regarded as novellas. The series is shown here in alphabetical order.

A Smile of Fortune — (1911)
Amy Foster — (1901)
An Anarchist — (1906)
An Outpost of Progress — (1897)
Because of the Dollars — (1915)
Falk: A Reminiscence — (1903)
Freya of the Seven Isles — (1912)
Gaspar Ruiz — (1906)
Il Conde — (1908)
Karain: A Memory — (1897)
Prince Roman — (1911)
The Black Mate — (1908)
The Brute — (1906)
The Duel — (1908)
The End of the Tether — (1902)
The Idiots — (1896)
The Informer — (1906)
The Inn of the Two Witches — (1915)
The Lagoon — (1897)
The Partner — (1915)
The Planter of Malata — (1915)
The Return — (1898)
The Secret Sharer — (1910)
The Shadow Line — (1917)
The Tale — (1917)
The Warrior’s Soul — (1917)
To-Morrow — (1902)
Typhoon — (1902)
Youth — (1898)

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales

The Evening Party

November 21, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Evening Party appears to have been written in the early 1920s, around the time of Virginia Woolf’s other experimental short stories. In her introduction to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf Susan Dick points out that the story appeared in the collection of sketches that was given the title Cracked Fiddles, though it is not clear if this was ever published or not.

Queen Anne’s Gate – Westminster

The Evening Party – critical commentary

This story has similar features to the other early pieces in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence. The setting is clearly a social gathering in central London, with guests arriving in formal evening dress. The principal characters – the narrator and her companion – are imaginatively detached from the event, and their interchanges are interrupted by people wishing to make social ‘introductions’. These features occur in many of the other early stories – from Phyllis and Rosamond to A Summing Up. The implication is that whilst social interaction is superficial and fellow guests are likely to be boring, there is a rich alternative in the inner life of the imagination.

The technical experimentation in the story comes from Woolf’s clever blending of interior monologue with a first person narrative which becomes a variation on the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique.

Ah, but let us wait a little! — The moon is up; the sky open; and there, rising in a mound against the sky with trees upon it, is the earth. The flowing silvery clouds look down upon Atlantic waves. The wind blows soft round the corner of the street, lifting my cloak, holding it gently in the air and then letting it sink and droop as the sea now swells and brims over the rocks and again withdraws.

At first reading it is not clear from whose point of view the story is being narrated, who is being addressed in the use of ‘us’, or where the events are located – on the Atlantic or in a street. In fact Woolf is presenting two ‘locations’ at the same time – one imagined and the other actual.

It was in these experimental fictions that Woolf devised, as Susan Dick observes, “a way to place her narrator within her character’s mind and to present that character’s thoughts and emotions as they occur”. However, it has to be said that her technique of mingling poetic imagery with practical narrative is more convincing in the non-conversational parts of the story than in the verbal ‘exchanges’ that take place between the characters. In a work of this kind it is simply not possible to believe that one character would say to another – “Don’t you see the pond through the Professor’s head? Don’t you see the swan swimming through Mary’s skirt?” – although it also has to be admitted that Woolf did bring this technique into the realms of the credible by the time she wrote The Waves (1931).

But she is successful in expressing via more credible dialogue an early version of her notion of ‘moments of being’. These are the brief and particular moments of time during which individuals can experience a sense of wholeness or completeness, a sense of being in harmony either with themselves or with the world around them, or they might feel that a significant truth is revealed to them, by accident almost, via the events of everyday life. The narrator here addresses her companion:

‘Don’t you remember in early childhood, when, in play or talk, as one stepped across the puddle or reached the window on the landing, some imperceptible shock froze the universe to a solid ball of crystal which one held for a moment — I have some mystical belief that all time past and future too, the tears and powdered ashes of generations clotted to a ball; then we were absolute and entire; nothing then was excluded; that was certainty — happiness.

Very characteristically however, Woolf immediately goes on to demolish this mystical vision of ‘completeness’ or ‘knowledge’ in the very next sentence: ‘See what comes of trying to say what one means! Nonsense!’ This is very similar to the way she undercuts her own imaginative inventions in stories such as The Mark on the Wall and An Unwritten Novel.

The Evening Party – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Evening Party – plot summary

The story begins with an un-named narrator conjouring poetic imagery out of the surroundings and her imagination. The setting appears to be evening in a city, where the narrator and her companion arrive at a party along with other guests.

The two of them exchange fanciful imagery – one composed of visual and the other of literary impressions. They then exchange observations with a professor, first about Shelley’s use of punctuation, then about classic literature. When he leaves, they go on to discuss ‘moments of being’ and the limitations of speech to arrive at an understanding of the world.

The party hostess interrupts them to introduce the narrator to a Mr Nevill, who admires her writing. They discuss the value of dead authors – and Shakespeare in particular, their enthusiasm for whom dissolves into an exchange of fanciful poetic images. This conversation is interrupted by a woman called Helen who introduces her to someone who knew her as a child.

The narrator rejoins her companion, and after exchanging further fragmentary observations about the party and the night, they agree to leave, hand in hand.

Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.
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The Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.
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