By Megan Thomas

I’ve never read Virginia Woolf, and I’ve always heard mixed reviews – probably because of her focus on life’s mundanities and her harsh realism, void of overly romanticised observations or uncommon situations. I thought her short stories would be a good way to ease myself in.
Woolf’s stories can be likened to how, in her story “Solid Objects“, she describes a child’s process of selecting a specific rock on a path full of them – completely arbitrary and yet painfully contemplated. Each story is a small scene or anecdote that, as a result of being a part of the world, reflects the entire world. A shard of mirror that can reflect nothing but reality, despite being fragmented.
I love some of them. I had to read some of them twice and then I loved them. I had to read some of them twice, then read a summary explanation article, then read it again knowing what it was meant to be about, and then I loved them. And some I didn’t like. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t give them a go – nobody writes off a book because of a bad chapter, and I’m a firm believer you should adopt the same approach with short story anthologies.
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One response to “Virginia Woolf’s Selected Short Stories”
[…] which brought us everything from Harry Potter and Sexing The Cherry, but also where author Virginia Woolf and her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, founded The Bloomsbury Group. The Bloomsbury group was a […]
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