6/28/2023 0 Comments Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf![]() ![]() Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture–all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble or the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or, falling into a raindrop, it expanded. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Written in Woolf's trademark style, brimming with keen observation and rich language, Kew Gardens is both a paean to the natural world and an empathetic exploration of human experience. She is more like the green insect which darts about the place in a less predictable and linear fashion: ![]() ![]() The snail, with its definite course and goal ahead of it, seems to represent the older, more linear style of narrative which Woolf is moving away from with her modernist short stories. Yet it may be that that it’s not the snail but the ‘green insect’ that Woolf wishes us to observe here. Kew Gardens is one of Virginia Woolf ‘s earliest short stories, written around 1917 and published in her first collection of fiction, Monday or Tuesday (1921). ![]()
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