Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
12 - ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Such Absences!’
- 1 Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: or, Her Silence on Master William
- 2 ‘The Proper Writing of Lives’: Biography versus Fiction in Woolf's Early Work
- 3 Night and Day: The Marriage of Dreams and Realities
- 4 Reading People, Reading Texts: ‘Byron and Mr Briggs’
- 5 ‘Modernism's Lost Hope’: Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the Printing of Paris
- 6 The Search for Form (i): Fry, Formalism and Fiction
- 7 The Search for Form (ii): Revision and the Numbers of Time
- 8 ‘This Moment I Stand On’: Virginia Woolf and the Spaces in Time
- 9 ‘Like a Shell on a Sandhill’: Woolf's Images of Emptiness
- 10 Constantinople: At the Crossroads of the Imagination
- 11 The Conversation behind the Conversation: Speaking the Unspeakable
- 12 ‘Sudden Intensities’: Frame and Focus in Woolf's Later Short Stories
- 13 ‘Almost Ashamed of England Being so English’: Woolf and Ideas of Englishness
- 14 Between the Texts: Woolf's Acts of Revision
- Index
Summary
‘I w[oul]d like to write a dream story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of colour; silence … & the solitude’ wrote Woolf in June 1937 as she laboured over the arguments of Three Guineas:
I cant though. But shant I, one of these days, indulge myself in some short releases into that world? Short now for ever. No more long grinds: only sudden intensities … And its useless to repeat my old experiments: they must be new to be experiments.
(Diary v, 95–6)For Woolf, as for other novelists such as Dickens or Henry James, the short story was a playground or exercise yard, or else a sketchbook in which she renewed her search for ‘the essential thing’, developing through fiction her thoughts on the connections between experience, perception and imagination, and their expression in words or paintings. Because she used her stories to carry her thinking forward, their publication was comparatively unimportant to her: she published eight of them in Monday or Tuesday (1921), while others – for example, ‘The Evening Party’ or ‘Sympathy’, by no means her slightest – remained uncollected and unpublished during her lifetime. ‘Lappin and Lapinova’, dating from around 1918 as those did, was published in the United States in 1939 when she felt short of money.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reading Virginia Woolf , pp. 172 - 189Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006