First up today, I need to confess about a rather foolish faux pas I made when I was trailing possible reads for 1920 (and if you read the post you may well know what I mean!) For some unknown reason, I got it into my head that Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” was published in 1920, which is of course rubbish – the book came out in 1925! Nevertheless, there it is in the picture I shared of possibles, so silly me!

I’m not sure if I had actually intended a re-read however; but this did make me wonder what Woolf there *was* from 1920, and a little researching revealed a couple of short stories which I decided to revisit. Both are in a collection of “Selected Short Stories” I posted about a while back, but I thought I would look at these in more detail.

The stories are “Solid Objects” and “An Unwritten Novel“; the latter appeared in “Monday or Tuesday”, and both were issues posthumously in the “A Haunted House” collection. Although written in the same year, these stories have very different subject matter and a very different feel, but both are haunting.

“Solid Objects” is more of what you might call a traditional story, telling of two young men, Charles and John, whose lives diverge in unexpected ways after John finds a stone on the beach which he takes home with him. His fascination with objects becomes a consuming passion and overtakes everything else in his life in a quite chilling fashion. In just over six pages, Woolf weaves a narrative that captures a man’s obsession in beautiful prose.

The second piece, “An Unwritten Novel” is a little more unusual as despite being described as fiction, the reader can’t help but regarding this as a glimpse of Woolf’s mind at play. The narrator is travelling by train to the south coast, just as would have Woolf, and on her journey spins stories around a fellow passenger, inventing a whole life for her based on her appearance alone and what she can read from this and the woman’s face. She gives her a name, a family, a whole background, and these flights of fancy are the unwritten novel of the title. These illusions may be shattered, but for a while the character of Minnie Marsh, developed by Woolf’s genius, exists.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s an intriguing and again beautifully written work, and as it portrays a novelist at work it’s impossible not to conflate it with Virginia Woolf herself. The story seems to arrest Woolf at the moment of creation, allowing us an insight into how her mind works and how her art is formed, which is utterly fascinating.

Woolf’s writing is always stunning and both of these stories reminded me how much I love her prose, her vivid imagination, the fertility of her imagery and her way of sliding off at tangents but never losing her point. Even though the novels which are regarded as her finest were still ahead of her, Woolf was obviously already exploring different ways to write and tell stories, with wonderful results. I’m so glad our reading club made me focus on these two works and I’m getting the itch to start up some kind of Woolf re-reading project – if only there were more hours in the day! 😀