Really Random Tuesday #66: A Good Dinner and a Book Winner

Was Virginia Woolf a foodie?  Ahead of her time in many ways, she wrote about the importance of giving women more equality, and was one of the first modern writers to write about food. Virginia Woolf defied the conventions of the time, and described the "soles and partridges and potatoes", the food served at a luncheon, in A Room of One's Own.  At the very least, she appreciated the benefits of eating well, of "a good dinner".

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."

~Virginia Woolf

Do you think Virginia Woolf would be a vegetarian, or even a vegan, if she lived in the present day? I  think maybe she would be.

Even if you're not vegetarian, the dish below is quick and easy to make.  I think it would've pleased discerning Virginia Woolf.

~ Pasta with Sun-dried Tomatoes ~

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.   - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quote/15338/#sthash.d80REBHP.dpuf

It's been ages since I last cooked with sun-dried tomatoes!  I used to buy them quite often.  When my friend, Diane, mentioned them to me recently, I recalled their intense flavor, and decided to make them the focus in a vegetarian pasta dish.  Diane combined sun-dried tomatoes with cappellini, or angel hair pasta, which sounded very good to me.  Since I didn't have much cappellini on hand, I decided to use vegetable radiatore from Trader Joe's, as I had a full package.  Created in the 1960s by an industrial designer, radiatori are little pasta shapes that resemble radiators. (They do remind me of the hissing radiators from my childhood, whose sounds at night were oddly reassuring.)

Ingredients:

8 ounces of pasta, such as cappellini or radiatore

1 - 2  tablespoons of olive oil

2 cloves of fresh garlic, minced

1 ounce sun-dried tomatoes

4 or 5 white mushrooms, sliced

1/4 cup of water (or red wine)

Oregano or basil to taste

Parmesan cheese for topping

Directions: 
In a small pan, cook two cloves of minced garlic in about a tablespoon and a half of olive oil for a couple of minutes, then add the sliced mushrooms, an ounce or so of sun-dried tomatoes (which need to soak beforehand in warm water for 15 minutes), about 1/4 cup of water (or red wine), and generous sprinkles of oregano.  Of course, you could also use basil instead of or in addition to the oregano, and add pepper, too, if desired.  (I have a lot of organic oregano right now from my garden so I used that.)  Cook for about 25 minutes over a low flame on the stovetop, stirring occasionally.  While this mixture is cooking, cook the pasta according to directions on package, for about 10 minutes, then drain in a colander.  I used about 2/3 of a 12 ounce package of pasta to make two generous servings. This recipe can be easily adjusted to make more servings.

Toss the pasta with the sun-dried tomato mixture, and top with shredded and/or grated Parmesan cheese (unless you are vegan).  A fresh garden salad goes well with this dish.

Pasta with Sun-dried Tomatoes

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The randomly chosen winner of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall is Carol N. Wong.  Congratulations, Carol!   I think you'll enjoy this biography about Margaret Fuller, who influenced and inspired others, including Virginia Woolf.  

Thanks to everyone who participated in this book giveaway.  I have other giveaways listed on the right side of my blog for those of you interested in winning other books.  Please take a look!

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Appearing on random Tuesdays, Really Random Tuesday is a way to post odds and ends--announcements, musings, quotes, photos--any blogging and book-related matters you can think of.  If you have miscellaneous book news to gather up and are inspired by this idea, "grab" the button for use on your own blog, then add your link to the "master" Mister Linky on the Really Random Tuesday page. 

Happy Tuesday!  I welcome your participation in this meme, and your comments.

(Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry, c. 1917, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Margaret Fuller ~ A New American Life: Review and Giveaway

Was Margaret Fuller America's first true feminist? 

Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) was a writer and an advocate for women's rights, including women's education and the right to employment; she also encouraged prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Susan B. Anthony, and other advocates for women's rights, including Virginia Woolf, were inspired and influenced by the work of Margaret Fuller.  Megan Marshall, the award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters, presents a powerful portrait of a true pioneer in the biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, published in 2013.

"She insisted too that her ideas be valued as high as those of the brilliant men who were her comrades."
~ Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall

Born in Cambridge, MA, Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, usually known as Margaret Fuller, was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism, and a transcendentalist.  Home-schooled in a rigorous fashion as a child by her father, Timothy Fuller, she later attended school outside of her home, and eventually became a teacher.

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
~Margaret Fuller

Highly intelligent, she was a precocious and voracious reader, and by the time she was in her 30s, she was known as the best-read person in New England.  She was confident and competent, and she didn't allow others to 'erode her enthusiastic confidence of the future'.

Starting in 1839, she began hosting "Conversations", discussions among women on various topics (the first one focused on Greek and Roman mythology), which encouraged women to communicate with each other in a candid way, and were early consciousness-raising groups for women.  She became the first editor of  Henry David Thoreau's transcendentalist journal, The Dial, in 1840, and a few years later, in 1844, she joined the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley.  Her influential work, available as a free ebook on Project Gutenberg, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1845 (other books by Margaret Fuller are also available online).  This book is considered to be the first major feminist work in the United States.

Margaret Fuller became the first female correspondent in Europe for the Tribune, and she became involved with the Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states.  She had a romantic relationship with a younger man, Giovanni Ossoli, and they had a child together.  Sadly, the family of three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, in 1850, when Margaret Fuller was 40 years old.

Through extensive research which included the reading of her letters, journals, and published work, Megan Marshall brings Margaret Fuller to life.  Throughout her life, Margaret Fuller was a prolific letter writer who "maintained important correspondences" with transcendental thinkers of her time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (who I've envisioned like Thoreau, walking alone in the woods, contemplating human nature in nature).  She was friends with many intellectuals, including Emerson, Thoreau, the Peabody sisters, the Alcotts, Carlyle, and Mazzini.

If you've ever entertained the idea that people who lived in the 1800s were perhaps deeper thinkers than people today, this book will reaffirm that belief.  This biography gives Margaret Fuller an eloquent voice and presence, by using many of her written words, in quotes. The use of Margaret Fuller's own words, extracted from her letters, journals and work, allows her to tell her own story--this book is almost like an autobiography. (I believe it may be more truthful because it was largely created by the subject's exact words.)  I experienced her profound, astonishing intelligence, and vivacious, sociable personality, in an intimate fashion.  In addition to the quotes throughout the text, many of the chapter titles are quotes from Margaret Fuller's writing.

As I read this biography, I became familiar with Margaret Fuller's manner of speaking and expression of ideas, and I felt as if I were getting to know her beyond a superficial level, as is often the case when we read the personal letters of others, which are filled with thought and feeling.  I also discovered her innate, articulated need to express herself--'a mind that insisted on utterance'--and to go beyond self to help others, especially women.

"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."
~Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was truly a woman ahead of her time, who believed that women deserved to be seen as the equals of men, and that marriage should be egalitarian (or at least more egalitarian).  Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is an impressive, well-crafted biography, which features some finely-detailed pictures.  It's a brilliant choice for anyone interested in learning about the life of this remarkable writer and pioneer.

Exciting news for my readers!  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is generously offering a copy of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life as a giveaway (U.S./Canada only).

• To enter this giveaway, simply leave a comment.
• For another chance at winning, become a follower of this blog, or let me know that you're already a follower.
• For an additional chance, post about this giveaway on your blog, Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.

Enter by 5 PM PDT on Monday, June 3.  One winner will be selected randomly and announced on Tuesday, June 4.  Good luck! 


Special thanks to Lisa from TLC for sending me an advance copy of this book.  For additional reviews and other features, please visit the other stops on TLC's book tour of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.

Really Random Tuesday #7: Giveaway Winners and Cats vs Dogs

Congratulations to PA and Jinky! Each won a copy of Kaleidoscope: An Asian Journey of Colors, a collection of poems by Sweta Srivastava Vikram. And Miss Lissy has won a copy of An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon. Congratulations, Miss Lissy! Thanks to everyone who participated in these giveaways. It was a lot of fun for me to host them and to read all of the wonderful comments. If you didn't win this time, please take a look at the other book giveaways posted on the right side of my blog and try your luck again if anything appeals to you.

Last week, Avis from She Reads and Reads included some photos of her photogenic cat, Cairo, in her Really Random Tuesday post, whereas Naida from the bookworm often posts photos of Diego, her adorable chihuahua. Today Veens from Giving Reading a Chance treats us to some pictures of her very beautiful baby boy. This Tuesday, I decided to include some photos as well. I don' t have a baby at this point in my life, but I do have a cat and a dog.

Sara

"As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows cats have enormous patience with the limitations of human kind."
~Cleveland Amory

Jenny

"No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does."
~Christopher Morley

My guess is that most book bloggers prefer cats to dogs, but I could certainly be wrong. (I would have thought that Virginia Woolf was a cat person, due to her introspective nature, yet she wrote the biography Flush, a book devoted to a cocker spaniel owned by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.) Perhaps many of you, like me, appreciate the attributes of cats and dogs. Are you a cat person or a dog person--or both, like me?

Really Random Tuesday is a way to post odds and ends--announcements, musings, quotes, photos--any blogging and book-related things you can think of. If you're inspired by this idea, feel free to copy the button and use it on your own blog. Please leave a link in the comments if you’re participating. Thanks for reading!

Simple Abundance

"Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world."
~ Virginia Woolf in her essay, Street Haunting

Virginia Woolf was right.  She believed that the "perfect treat must include a visit to the second-hand bookshop", and so does the author of the book I'm currently reading, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort of Joyby Sarah Ban Breathnach. Aptly, I found this book at a second-hand shop, a thrift store with a room brimming full of a wide assortment of books of all ages, some old, some new, and some in-between. I try to visit this shop about once a month, and more often than not, leave feeling quite fortunate, as I find numerous books, some rare, some signed, and others that I've simply wanted to read. As so often is the case, I'd been thinking about how much I have to be thankful for when I pulled this thick book from the shelf. (Did my thoughts lead me to the perfect book for my state of mind?) At any rate, I opened it up, skimmed a couple of pages, and quickly decided to purchase it (for the ridiculously low price of $1.00). The woman who rang up my purchase seemed to smile knowingly at me (had she read the book, or heard about it on Oprah?) and gave me a cloth tote bag to carry my loot home in.

Published in 1995, each day of the year corresponds to an essay which begins with a related quotation. Now, if you don't like quotations by people such as authors, then you might not enjoy this book.  But I enjoy a good quotation. Here's a sampling of quotations from Simple Abundance, related to writing and books, for those of you who do enjoy reading them.

"I will write myself into well-being."
~ Nancy Mair

"We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."
~ Ursula K. LeGuin

"We are the hero of our own story."
~ Mary McCarthy

These are not stereotypical, boring essays; they're entertaining, funny, and thoughtful words recorded by a "diligent wordsmith".   Many days or pages are devoted to books, and to writing and other creative pursuits, which I read with extra anticipation. These essays, or meditations as they are called, with titles such as The Comfort Found in Good Old Books and A Nook of Your Own, 366 in all, are full of insights and questions.  Although I do not approach this book with reckless abandon, I do break a few rules.  Because the year 1995 has already passed, I feel free to read as many pages as I want to at a sitting rather than one per calendar day, and to jump around a bit, too.   It is such a pleasure to go to my reading couch with this book and a cup of tea, and get lost in the pages.  (The icing on the cake is when my dog joins me, her quiet presence yet another gift to be grateful for.)  Again, I feel as if this is the book I'm supposed to be reading at this point in my life; it's been a source of inspiration and pleasure.  After a session with Simple Abundance, I feel renewed.

Your comments are welcomed.

To the Lighthouse

After reading some lighter fiction, I decided to delve into something deeper, a novel by Virginia Woolf. I located the tattered copy from my school days and took a deep breath. Here is another phenomenal book by Virginia Woolf. Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse broke new ground and Virginia Woolf emerged as the chief figure of modernism--and perhaps feminism--in England.

The book begins as Mrs. Ramsay, mother to eight children, speaks to her youngest child, James, age six, about his wish to go to the Lighthouse on the following day:

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark", she added. To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition bound to take place, and the wonder to which he looked forward to, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. ~To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

However, Mr. Ramsay, as well as Charles Tansley, soon shatter the boy's hopes by saying that it will rain the next day, and that a trip to the Lighthouse is out of the question, which upsets both James and his devoted mother greatly. The setting for the story begins at the summer house at the Isle of the Skye during the summer, where the Ramsays entertain numerous friends in addition to their large family. Mrs. Ramsay tries to soothe the boy by saying that the weather may be fine, because she has a far greater understanding of her sensitive, gifted child than either her husband or his friend. Keenly aware of the beauty and brevity of childhood, she wants her children to be happy and hopeful, to be filled with light, in a world with ample darkness. The novel focuses on the intensity of childhood emotions, and accentuates the impermanence of adult relationships and the transient nature of everything. The issue of the trip to the Lighthouse is brought up time and time again in the first section of To the Lighthouse, The Window, in which through repetition and stream-of-consciousness writing (Virginia Woolf's trademark style), the interior monologues of various characters are presented, seizing fleeting moods, feelings, thoughts, and insecurities, and the transient nature of things and relationships, giving permanence to these moments in the book, making them immortal--which seems to have been the author's goal. Like our own thoughts, which are often repetitious (and dare I say dull at times), the characters seem to tire of their own cyclical thoughts. At other times, their disjointed thoughts are featured. Virginia Woolf captures the dual reality of thought in To The Lighthouse, thought which is alternatively repetitive and disconnected. (Think about your own thinking--isn't it also this way?)

Just as in the story the painter Lily Briscoe tries to capture beautiful Mrs. Ramsay in a painting (although Lily is scoffed at, and the male belief was that women could neither paint nor write) the book attempts to make the impermanent permanent, and portrays these fleeting moments brilliantly, especially those between husband and wife. This is Virginia's Woolf's most autobiographical novel, and her husband, Leonard Woolf, called it a masterpiece. Virginia Woolf broke from tradition in this three part book, a novel in which there's not much action or dialogue, but instead much thought, about the ordinary as well as about time and the fleeting nature of life. One of the book's main themes is the ubiquity of transience. Is there an antidote for this often disturbing transience? Virginia Woolf suggests to women that while family and human relationships are important (although difficult sometimes), creative work may hold the key--meaningful work that will engage and may even outlive us. In this way, transience may be transcended to some degree.

You can read all three sections of To The Lighthouse online, compliments of Project Gutenberg Australia. To the Lighthouse was made into a TV movie released in 1983, which stars Rosemary Harris, Michael Gough, Suzanne Bertish, and Kenneth Branagh.

1/30/10 Update: For another review of To The Lighthouse, please visit Absorbed in Words.

Books in the Mail

My literary adventures continue in earnest. Though I'm still reading (and rereading) Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which really requires much study and thought, I've finished my "lighter reading", Morality for Beautiful Girls, another heart warming book in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. The New York Times Book Review calls Mma Ramotswe "the Miss Marple of Botswana" and her sundry adventures always manage to bring a smile to my face. I'll begin the next one soon, The Kalahari Typing School for Men, possibly tonight, if it appears in this afternoon's mail. I've been getting books in the mail almost every day for the past week, from Amazon marketplace sellers--they've really come through! The books have been arriving faster than I had even hoped, and are in fine condition. If The Kalahari Typing School for Men doesn't arrive today I may start All In Together Girls, a book of short stories by Canadian author Kate Sutherland.

A Room of One's Own ~ Women and Poetry

"Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own."
- A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

In her essay, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf offers this conclusion after she surveys history and finds that women are the subjects of poetry but not the authors. Very few women could achieve the "incandescent mind" of an artist such as Shakespeare, according to Virginia Woolf, because of their poverty and society's restrictions. She reflects upon the scarcity of women poets throughout the ages and in particular in Elizabethan England:

"For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet."
~A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

In a previous post called The New Dress, I stated that Virginia Woolf believed women were best suited to write fiction from their sitting-rooms, because their lives didn't lead to the opportunity to create poetry. In A Room of One's Own, she elaborates eloquently with encouraging words:

"I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee's life of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh."
- A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf

As a writer Virginia Woolf was keenly aware of the constraints on women--her notebook attests to this struggle--as they sought both financial and creative freedom, and she felt the need to entreat her audience, initially young college women, to write not only fiction but poetry (as well as criticism and scholarly works). As a feminist of the early 1900's, Virginia Woolf's epic essay encourages women to express themselves through art and achievement, and to become a vital part of history.

A Room of One's Own

"One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well."
~Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

I'm rereading Virginia Woolf's very intense A Room of One's Own, which is actually a long essay she wrote "with ardour and conviction" on the the topic of women and fiction, that she prepared when asked to speak about this subject at women's colleges. A Room of One's Own was published in 1929, when young women were still discouraged from attending college (due to genuine fear that a good education would make women unfit for marriage and motherhood), and although it's not angry in tone the essay reflects a society in which severe limitations were put on women and their achievements. Virginia Woolf speaks about the creative process that lead to her talks, of her notebook in which she recorded a multitude of ideas, thoughts, and mental meanderings, and writes about the train of thought that led to her conclusion, that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf grapples with what is exactly meant by women and fiction (not a simple matter), and demonstrates and expresses the complexity of her thought in her trademark stream-of-consciousness writing. Defying conventions of the time, she talks about the actual food served at the luncheon party, of the soles and partridges and potatoes, and of the importance of food to the artist in a more general sense. She discusses numerous things in this full, layered essay of her thoughts, among them a sense of loss due to the war which began in August of 1914, that changed the underlying current of life--previously filled with music and poetry, with romance--and of the special difficulties women artists face (still relevant today!). Her message is simple (though the means is not), that women must have money (a fixed income) and a room of their own (privacy) in order to have the freedom to create, luxuries that men may take for granted. She imagines Shakespeare's "sister", equal in talent and genius, but because of her sex, never writes a word, never expresses her genius, never lives to old age because she takes her own life in quiet desperation. Her essay is meant to encourage young women, to inspire them to create, as she's sympathetic to their plight. In A Room of One's Own,Virginia Woolf wants the limitations removed, and for women to have the same intellectual freedom that men have had for centuries, so that they, too, may express their genius.

As mentioned in a previous post, you can read A Room of One's Own online at eBooks@Adelaide.

More Works by Virginia Woolf

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
~A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf


I'm in the mood to read more works by Virginia Woolf. Today I ordered A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf from Amazon. While I wanted a copy of the book to read and for my library, you can also read the web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide (and thousands of other books may be read for free at Project Gutenberg!). I read A Room of One's Own in high school, and want to reread it. I think I understood it at the time but feel as if I'll get much more out of it now that I'm older (and hopefully wiser). I've already talked about Virginia Woolf a bit in June posts, mostly in relation to her story The New Dress (also published online by eBooks@Adelaide), and will write about A Room of One's Own and Woolf's thoughts (as well as my own) in the not too distant future.

(First edition cover pictured above.)

Virginia Woolf

Last night I relaxed in "reading bed" with my daughter (she fell asleep next to me) and finished The Hidden Target. It's an exciting book, and I'm glad to have had the experience of reading something different from my usual choices.

Eager for more moments of illumination, I'm now ready to delve into other books and stories, fiction and non-fiction, that have been waiting for my attention. I think Women & Fiction: Short Stories by and about Women will hold my interest because I've already read some of it and was completely transfixed by Virginia Woolf's short story, The New Dress, in which the protagonist, Mabel Waring, expresses great angst and feels awkward in the "idiotically old-fashioned" new dress she has had made and wears to an afternoon tea. Such honesty! (What woman has not felt that her own choice of clothing was wrong at some time?)

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) English novelist and essayist, was Adeline Virginia Stephen prior to her marriage to writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. She was both a feminist and a modernist. Her novels often departed from traditional plots to follow the inner lives and musings of her characters. A writer of extreme sensitivity and talent, Virginia Woolf may have been bipolar; she struggled with her own heightened awareness (like the main character in the New Dress), and bouts of depression, and ended her own life by drowning herself in a river, weighed down by stones in her pockets.

Photo from Wikipedia.

The New Dress

Even though I'm in the middle of another book, I couldn't resist reading the Virginia Woolf section of Women & Fiction: Short Stories By and About Women. Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was educated at home, and had the benefit of her father's great library, as well as the company of her father's friends, prominent people such as Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Ruskin.

In the introduction of Women & Fiction editor Susan Cahill quotes Virginia Woolf:

". . . living as she did in the common sitting-room, surrounded by people, a women was trained to use her mind in observation and upon the analysis of character. She was trained to be a novelist and not be a poet."
~Granite and Rainbow, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf believed that women were better suited to write novels rather than poetry because of their role in society as observers in parlors and sitting-rooms, rather than adventurers out in the world that "belonged" to men. Woolf's fiction centers around the consciousness of women--their thoughts, the people and relationships in their lives, and social appearances and customs. This was her world, her experience, and although it may have been limiting in certain respects, she used her sensitivity to generate a prolific career as a fiction writer. Women & Fiction features her short story, The New Dress, in which the main character, Mabel Waring, agonizes over her decision to wear her new dress to an afternoon tea at Mrs. Dalloway's. It's brutally honest and real, and painful to read as Mabel, who feels like a "dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly" reveals her true thoughts and insecurities.

Written in 1924 (but not published until 1927), The New Dress is one of Virginia Woolf's most popular short stories, still widely read today; you can even read it online. What did Virginia Woolf think about short stories? She never prioritized this genre, although she wrote short fiction throughout her writing career. For Virginia Woolf, short stories may have been projects to sustain her between novels. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, said she "used at intervals to write short stories. It was her custom, whenever an idea for one occurred to her, to sketch it out in a very rough form and then to put it away in a drawer. Later, if an editor asked her for a short story, and she felt in the mood to write one (which was not frequent), she would take a sketch out of her drawer and rewrite it, sometimes a great many times. Or if she felt, as she often did, while writing a novel that she required to rest her mind by working on something else for a time, she would either write a critical essay or work upon one of her sketches for short stories." In 1921, Virginia and Leonard Woolf published Monday or Tuesday, (which you can read online), a volume of eight short stories, the only collection of Woolf's stories published during her lifetime.

Monday or Tuesday

• The Mark On The Wall
• A Haunted House
• A Society
• Monday Or Tuesday
• An Unwritten Novel
• The String Quartet
• Blue & Green
• Kew Gardens