Monday or Tuesday
Virginia Woolf
Monday or Tuesday
19 chapters·2h 1m listening·Also in Romanian
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"Monday or Tuesday" by Virginia Woolf is a short story collection published in 1921. The book contains eight experimental stories that capture the fleeting impressions and sensations of ordinary life. Printed by The Hogarth Press with woodcuts by Vanessa Bell, the collection includes previously published pieces like "The Mark on the Wall" and "Kew Gardens" alongside new works. The title reflects Woolf's belief that fiction should illuminate the continuous stream of impressions that shape everyday experience, whether Monday or Tuesday.
Contains spoilers for the entire book
- Themes
- Atmosphere
About the book
Published in 1921, Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short stories Virginia Woolf published in her lifetime. The Hogarth Press, run by Woolf and her husband Leonard, printed its eight pieces with woodcuts by her sister Vanessa Bell. They include The Mark on the Wall, in which a mark on a wall sets off a train of thought, and Kew Gardens, a walk through the gardens seen partly at the level of a snail. The stories are the workshop in which Woolf tried the methods of her later novels: following thought instead of incident, letting several voices overlap, and treating an ordinary moment as worth a whole narrative. Some are barely stories at all, closer to prose poems or sketches of perception.
Characters
Clorinda — A Society
A woman who urges her companions to investigate men's achievements before accepting conventional claims about their superiority.
Poll — A Society
A voracious reader whose doubts about books help set the society's investigation in motion.
Minnie Marsh — An Unwritten Novel
A woman observed on a train whose appearance prompts the narrator to invent a possible life for her.
The narrator of An Unwritten Novel — Storyteller
A railway passenger who constructs, questions, and revises an imagined biography of a fellow traveler.
Simon — Kew Gardens
A father walking through the gardens whose thoughts return to a marriage proposal from his past.
Eleanor — Kew Gardens
Simon's wife, whose recollections accompany the family's walk past a flowerbed.
The narrator of The Mark on the Wall — Reflective voice
An observer whose thoughts wander from a small mark to questions of knowledge, habit, and authority.
About the author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist and essayist, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. She wrote novels that follow consciousness rather than plot — a day in a city, a decade passing in an empty house — and found a form for the way attention actually moves. With her husband Leonard she ran the Hogarth Press, which published her own books along with T. S. Eliot and the first English translations of Freud. Her work includes Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and the essay A Room of One's Own.