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A review by jmiae
The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf: Second Edition by Virginia Woolf
5.0
The more I read of Virginia Woolf, the deeper in love I fall with her writing.
For a long time, I was sceptical of short stories. Not as a form of writing, but just as the value it would bring to the leisure reader, which I certainly am. I tried F. Scott Fitzgerald in 2013 then Oscar Wilde. I preferred Wilde's to Fitzgerald's, but still found that I preferred novels to short fiction. Five years later, I've somehow managed to wind up with short story collections of two female writers separated by nearly a century but whose short prose I have enjoyed immensely: Jhumpa Lahiri and Virginia Woolf. Two very different writers, but both excellent examples of how incredibly satisfying short stories can be.
This particular collection is quite exhaustive and frankly meant for those inclined to be scholars of Virginia Woolf rather than an appreciative reader. I referred to the end notes for maybe the first third of the collection before deciding that editorial remarks on what Woolf had added or removed from a given paragraph were, while interesting, not particularly conducive to grasping the feel of each story. But they're there for those who would find literary insight from them, along with several indexes of incomplete fiction and other collections of information about her writing career.
For me, mainly, reading this took longer than expected but for once this extra time to read a single book was necessary and rewarding. You cannot rush through Virginia Woolf, not even short stories, without missing out on something vital. These pieces are all of them gorgeous, though some are harder to grasp than others. It is a true art, to be able to so completely convey so much about characters and places in the span of mere pages.
A day after finishing this collection, I listened to an episode called "Why should we read short stories" by The Monocle podcast. The panel does a fantastic job of explaining why short stories, when done well, are just so damn impressive: https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-monocle-culture-show/327/
For a long time, I was sceptical of short stories. Not as a form of writing, but just as the value it would bring to the leisure reader, which I certainly am. I tried F. Scott Fitzgerald in 2013 then Oscar Wilde. I preferred Wilde's to Fitzgerald's, but still found that I preferred novels to short fiction. Five years later, I've somehow managed to wind up with short story collections of two female writers separated by nearly a century but whose short prose I have enjoyed immensely: Jhumpa Lahiri and Virginia Woolf. Two very different writers, but both excellent examples of how incredibly satisfying short stories can be.
This particular collection is quite exhaustive and frankly meant for those inclined to be scholars of Virginia Woolf rather than an appreciative reader. I referred to the end notes for maybe the first third of the collection before deciding that editorial remarks on what Woolf had added or removed from a given paragraph were, while interesting, not particularly conducive to grasping the feel of each story. But they're there for those who would find literary insight from them, along with several indexes of incomplete fiction and other collections of information about her writing career.
For me, mainly, reading this took longer than expected but for once this extra time to read a single book was necessary and rewarding. You cannot rush through Virginia Woolf, not even short stories, without missing out on something vital. These pieces are all of them gorgeous, though some are harder to grasp than others. It is a true art, to be able to so completely convey so much about characters and places in the span of mere pages.
A day after finishing this collection, I listened to an episode called "Why should we read short stories" by The Monocle podcast. The panel does a fantastic job of explaining why short stories, when done well, are just so damn impressive: https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-monocle-culture-show/327/