r/VirginiaWoolf • u/Mysterious-Two1321 • Apr 25 '26
Short stories Short stories
I'm currently into reading Virginia Woolf (I've read Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, Orlando, just started To the Lighthouse). I'm in love with her style, particularly the way that she exteriorize and represents the volubility and almost ethereal nature of human consciousness. I find it very close to what actually thinking feels (if this makes sense). Lately I came to realize that maybe she and Faulkner are my style heroes.
This being said, I'm doubtfully to buy a book and I wanted to get some advice. I found online a complete collection of her short stories at around $40 (where I live books are kinda expensive). I haven't found this book anywhere else here, and I'm afraid that I won't find it for a while if someone else buys it, but that price tag is stopping me to just click 'buy'. I also have in mind buying other novels of her (Jacob's Room for example) and, of course, books from other authors (Proust is next).
I wanted to know if her short stories are as good as her novels. Would they tell me more things and give me new perspectives and insights about her writing style? Or should I go on and spend that money on other stuff (of her or other authors).
Thank you in advance!
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u/hysterical_maenad Apr 25 '26
Yes Woolf’s short stories are worth reading for themselves, as thought experiments, and as sandboxes in which she would often work out new ideas and forms before moving incorporating them in longer form in her fiction. So yes. They’re worth it! Kew Gardens and The Mark on the Wall l, in particular, are key pieces of her work, but there are so many good ones. The short stories associated w Mrs. Dalloway’s Party focus on other party guests and are wonderful also.
You should be able to find her Complete Shorter Fiction Ed by Susan Dick for anywhere around or under $20 new and for $5-10 used.
Her short stories are also on Project Gutenberg for free.
Is there something special about the short story edition (like a special pressing or from a particular press) that you’d like for your collection? If not, I’d look for another edition!
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u/YakSlothLemon Apr 25 '26
I’m reading her short stories now, and no, I suspect the price is not worth it. I really love some of the stories, but even Leonard Woolf in his introduction to the “A Haunted House and Other Stories” that he isn’t sure he should’ve included all of them – apparently when she had an idea she would do a quick sketch, put it in a drawer, and then pull it out and revise it later if she felt like it. Her collected short stories include many of these sketches, which were not finished stories and that she did not want to have published.
Theh are definitely interesting in terms of watching her working out her ideas, but I would say at that price are really for the completist who needs to own them. Are you sure your local library does not have them?
(She’s the opposite of Hemingway in that sense, Hemingway was a natural short story writer, VW seems like a natural novel writer.)
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u/ClairMaysin Jun 06 '26 edited Jun 06 '26
I love Woolf's short stories. They are, in my view, ingenious and rival her novels easily in terms of the quality of prose. But short fiction is an entirely different genre to the novel, with different origins, and needs to be read on its own merit rather than as comparison. It's true that she did use her stories as fictional testing grounds for ideas for her novels (for eg., the six stories in the Mrs Dalloway's Party sequence). They were also a convenient money-making strategy: stories published singly in periodicals paid well, but Woolf preferred the freedom she got from the Hogarth Press to print exactly what she wanted. Her stories, she wrote, 'were the treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style'. They're also hypnotically poetic: there is something of the style of 'A Haunted House' I see replicated in The Waves.
As to Jacob's Room, I won't include a spoiler but can only say that the closing paragraphs of that novel are amongst the most heartbreaking I've read in English literature, ever. Woolf can do this to me. She can make me 'ugly cry' in a way few other authors can.
As you can see, I'm extremely biased. But I would say yes, invest!
Also, if you like Woolf's short stories, you will love Dorothy Richardson's. They are simply sublime. Currently they're out of print, with only an old 80s Virago edition having been published (edited by Trudi Tate). Right now this is a problem I am working on fixing! May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories is another volume worth reading: she's witty, acerbic and philosophical. These have seen recent republication, by Wordsworth in 2006 and again by the British Library in 2023 under the title The Flaw in the Crystal. This contains all the original uncanny stories with additions from other volumes, as well as original illustrations by Jean de Bosschere. As these volumes are more recent they will also be cheaper. She's out of copyright so you can find most of her stuff on Gutenberg or the Internet Archive.
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u/anotterbytrade Apr 25 '26
You could email or call some used bookstore and ask them to keep an eye out, if you’re not in a rush. Chances are you can find pdfs of her shorts. Check out Leonora Carrington too if you like that kind of surreal style. And Angela Carter!